Helios

ONE

“This is not what I expected.”

George Pierce glanced over his shoulder at the young woman seated in the rear of the rented SUV. Fiona Sigler stared out the window at the landscape passing them by, a featureless grassy steppe stretching out to the horizon. “What were you expecting?”

Fiona turned to meet his gaze and shrugged. “Well, you know… Russia. I thought it would be more…” Another shrug. “Russian.”

“You do realize,” Pierce said, “that Russia is the largest country on Earth, geographically speaking, with many diverse ecoregions? It’s not all Doctor Zhivago and frozen tundra. I hope they taught you that at that expensive private academy your father sent you to.”

“Yes, Uncle George,” Fiona said, with more than a little exasperation. “I just didn’t expect it to look so much like Kansas.”

Pierce smiled. Fiona was not wrong. He knew on an intellectual level that Russia — all six-and-a-half-million square miles of it, fully one-eighth of the Earth’s habitable land — was comprised of a variety of climates and topographical zones. But the world outside the windows of their rented SUV bore little resemblance to his preconceived notion of what they would encounter during their excursion to Chelyabinsk Oblast. In truth, he had not known what to expect, but not anything so dull.

“Too many hills,” Erik Lazarus murmured from behind the steering wheel. “Kansas is a lot flatter than this.”

Fiona’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Is that even possible?”

“Aside from the fact that the road signs are all in Cyrillic,” Lazarus said, “it looks a lot like where I grew up.”

Pierce hid a smile. He sometimes forgot that the brooding Lazarus, a physically imposing man of few words, had grown up in the US Midwest. Iranian by birth, Lazarus had been adopted as an infant by an American couple — Derek and Ruth Somers — and spent his early years in rural Illinois, though it was his subsequent life experience as a Special Forces operator that seemed to define him.

Lazarus was right about the terrain, though calling the gentle undulations ‘hills’ was a bit of a stretch. Still, as a trained archaeologist, Pierce knew that even minor variations in the landscape could hide discoveries of monumental importance — especially here.

The archaeological significance of this particular parcel of Russian real estate had only been recently established. In 1987, Soviet surveyors preparing to flood the area to create a reservoir, to support the local iron mining industry, had discovered ruins thought to be associated with the Sintashta culture. The Bronze Age proto-Indian people had occupied the steppe to the east of the Ural Mountains, possibly as early as 2000 BCE. The site, named Arkaim — the word translated imprecisely to ‘arch’—had been called Russia’s Stonehenge, owing to its circular layout and possible significance as an ancient astronomical observatory. Like Stonehenge, Arkaim had become both a tourist destination, albeit a regional one, and a Mecca for believers in UFOs and other paranormal phenomena.

As an archaeologist specializing in the Classical Era, Pierce had only a passing familiarity with the Sintashta culture. In his new role as the Director of the Cerberus Group — the public face of the very secret Herculean Society, an ancient organization dedicated to preserving and protecting the legacy of the man whose life had inspired the legend of immortal Hercules — Pierce had been compelled to take a closer look at Arkaim.

During the course of a highly classified mission just a few months earlier, an American military special operations unit had discovered the remains of a megalithic city — predating even four thousand-year-old Arkaim — in the Ural Mountains, just a few hundred miles to the north. Contained within that nearly pristine site, was evidence of a prehistoric race of giants known as ‘the Originators.’ Their advanced — and possibly alien — technology had influenced the rise of human civilization, and in the wrong hands, it could just as easily end it.

The architectural similarity and close proximity of Arkaim suggested that it might also hide Originator artifacts, and that possibility obligated Pierce to take pre-emptive action. If there were Originator artifacts at Arkaim, or even clues hinting at the existence of that ancient and possibly otherworldly race, it was imperative that they not fall into the wrong hands. When technology with the potential to enslave or exterminate the human race was concerned, pretty much any hands were the wrong hands. It was the mission of the Cerberus Group to keep those things secret.

In his youth, Pierce had dreamed of being Indiana Jones, a dream that had directly fueled his interest in archaeology. But in his role as Director of the Cerberus Group, he was more like the workman from the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, hiding the prize away in a secret warehouse at Area 51, never to be seen again. He hated it, but he also knew that there was a very good reason for it. The upside was that sometimes, like today, he got to be Indiana Jones before he turned into Area 51 guy.

“The turn-off is coming up,” a disembodied female voice said. “Five hundred yards.”

“I see it,” Lazarus said, easing off the gas pedal. “Thanks, Cintia.”

Pierce glanced down at his satellite-enabled smartphone, which rested in a bracket mounted to the dashboard of the vehicle. The screen displayed a real-time GPS map, with their route and destination outlined in blue. But the voice that had issued from the speaker did not belong to an automated system, at least, not in the literal sense. Cintia Dourado was the Director of Technology for the Cerberus Group. She was probably more comfortable interacting with computer networks than she was with actual living humans. However, under her outlandish appearance of dyed hair, tattoos, and facial piercings, along with fashion choices that could only be described as eclectic, the Brazilian-born computer expert was still very human.

Partly because her job required her to stay close to the computer, but also because she was moderately agoraphobic, Cintia preferred to work from Cerberus Headquarters, beneath Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome. That was by no means a limitation, though. If the worldwide computer and satellite network was like an orchestra, then Cintia was the conductor, and together they made beautiful music.

“No problem,” Cintia replied. “I’m going to get the babelfish online, but if you get lost, you know where to find me.”

Lazarus turned the vehicle onto a rutted but serviceable dirt road and continued forward at a slower pace.

“And this is where we leave Kansas behind and head over the rainbow to Oz,” remarked the woman sitting beside Fiona in the back seat. Augustina Gallo was not only a professor of Classical History at the University of Athens — on an indefinite sabbatical to work with the Cerberus Group — but she was also Pierce’s girlfriend. Despite her name and her obvious Mediterranean ethnic heritage, Gallo was as American as a Georgia peach.

“Flying monkeys, I can deal with” Pierce said. “Russian bureaucrats, on the other hand, may prove a little more daunting.”

“That’s easy,” Fiona chimed in. “Just have Erik drop a house on them.”

Pierce thought he saw a hint of a smile touch Lazarus’s lips.

Although his acquaintance with Pierce went back more than half a decade, Lazarus, along with his girlfriend, geneticist Felice Carter, had only recently joined forces with Pierce to create the Cerberus Group. Lazarus’s official title was Director of Operations, but in practical terms, he was their protector. Pierce could not imagine anyone better suited to the job. In addition to more than a decade of military service, Lazarus was rhinoceros-strong, focused, and owing to an experimental serum that promoted rapid cellular regeneration, he was damn near indestructible.

Carter had her own unique…attributes. Several years before, during a research trip to the Great Rift Valley, she had been exposed to a retrovirus containing genetic material from one of humanity’s oldest shared ancestors. Stranger still, through a process known as quantum entanglement, Carter had become a living evolutionary kill-switch. The science of it boggled his mind, but the short version was that her mind and body had become entangled with every other human being on the planet. A hive mother to the human race.

When faced with an extreme threat, Carter could — without consciously intending to do so — psychically overpower anyone in the immediate area, transforming them into a sort of zombie protector driven to mindlessly defend her. Unfortunately, the effect was permanent. Fortunately, thus far the only people to suffer the effect were the aggressors who had intended her harm, but there was no guarantee that innocent bystanders or even her close friends would be spared if the circumstances were dire enough. And no one knew what would happen if Carter ever suffered a mortal injury. Because distance wasn’t a factor, the effect might be universal.

It was a dangerous ability, but Carter had dedicated herself to mastering mental discipline techniques, and she was confident of her ability to keep it under control. Still, keeping her out of harm’s way seemed prudent. Since their current mission did not call for her particular skill set, Cerberus’s Chief Scientific Adviser had elected to stay behind so she could continue an ongoing research project of special interest to Pierce.

The role of Fiona Sigler — she was not literally Pierce’s niece, but might as well have been — in the Cerberus Group was not as well defined as the others. She had an intuitive understanding of language mechanics and was well on her way to completing an undergraduate degree in linguistics with a second major in archaeology. That by itself made her a valuable addition to the team, but it was only the tip of the iceberg where Fiona was concerned. A Native American from a nearly extinct tribe in the Siletz Confederation of the Pacific Northwest, Fiona was the last surviving speaker of a language that was believed to be a direct offshoot of the ‘Mother Tongue,’ an ancient and mysterious form of expression that transcended mere communication.

It was nothing less than the language of creation.

In the Kabbalist tradition of Judaism, people like Fiona were called Baalei Shem—Masters of the Word — capable of using this secret, possibly divine language for miraculous purposes. If the stories from the Bible were true, it had been done many times throughout history. There were other possible explanations for the effect, ranging from metaphysics to quantum physics, but the bottom line was that a master of the Mother Tongue could literally change the world with a word.

Five years earlier, Pierce would have scoffed at the idea, but he had seen far stranger things.

The Siletz tribal language was not the Mother Tongue, but it was similar enough to give Fiona a foundation upon which to begin reconstructing the lost language. Her grasp of the Mother Tongue and how to use it was improving, but as she was often quick to point out, there was more to it than saying ‘Abracadabra’ or whatever the Mother Tongue equivalent was. There was an intentional aspect to it as well, mind over matter. Thus far, her ‘fluency’ was limited to the creation of golems — crude automata made from earthen materials like loose rock or clay — and to a lesser degree, the ability to change the density of solid rock. She, and anyone in close proximity, could walk through walls. The latter would be a handy trick for investigating subterranean chambers, if she was ever able to perfect the skill.

If Pierce’s suspicions about Arkaim were correct, she would soon have an opportunity to test herself. Although the site had not been fully explored, it was believed that an elaborate system of tunnels were hidden beneath the partly excavated ruins. Any Originator artifacts that might be on site would be found there.

A short drive on the dirt road brought them to a grassy meadow with rows of parked vehicles. Just beyond the cars, vans, and minibuses, were a slew of colored tents. A couple dozen people, who looked like a motley representation of Russian society, moved between the parking area and the tent city. Some wore the casual attire of vacationing tourists, but others wore blousy red and saffron robes that made them look more like day-trippers from a Yogic ashram or a Buddhist monastery.

“Is this an archaeological reserve or a Dead concert?” Gallo asked.

“Arkaim has a certain counter-culture appeal,” Pierce said. “Think of it as Russia’s Sedona.”

The comparison was apt. Like Sedona, Arizona, Arkaim was believed — at least by those inclined to believe — to be an anomaly zone, with frequent reports of UFOs and other unexplained phenomena. People from all over the region visited the site in hopes of having just such an encounter.

The odds favored a rational explanation — mass hysteria influenced by the power of suggestion — but there was a remote chance that something else was going on at Arkaim.

“Best to avoid making eye-contact,” Lazarus said, as he shouldered an over-sized backpack containing their survey gear, along with a couple of items Pierce hoped they wouldn’t need.

“Cintia, is the babelfish up and running?”

“I hate that you call it that,” Fiona muttered. “I’m sure it’s like copyright infringement or something.”

If she overheard the comment, Dourado gave no indication. “Just say the words.”

The babelfish, named for a fictional creature from a science-fiction novel, was Dourado’s sophisticated instantaneous translation system, instantaneous of course being a relative term. Rather than relying on computer-generated translations, which were awkward and often unreliable, the babelfish employed real human translators, recruited from the vast new labor pool of the modern ‘gig economy’ and networked together by a computer-based voice communication platform.

While it was not a revolutionary idea, what made the babelfish unique was its security. By employing multiple translators simultaneously and feeding most of them randomly generated alternative phrases, no one translator would ever hear an entire conversation. The person hearing the foreign language and supplying an English interpretation for the field user — Pierce in this case — would not be the same person to translate the reply. Such extreme measures were unnecessary for simple interactions, but intelligence services could extrapolate broad conclusions from irrelevant and fragmentary data supplied by informants and electronic eavesdropping programs. Given the secretive and sometimes dangerous nature of Cerberus Group operations, there was no such thing as too careful.

Pierce fitted a custom-made Bluetooth device to his ear and recited a test phrase as he got out of the vehicle. “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”

There was a momentary pause, and then an electronic approximation of his own voice repeating the phrase, but in Russian, issued from the speaker on his phone. Satisfied with the test, Pierce led the group across the field toward the Arkaim preserve’s entrance.

The site was intended as an open air museum, where visitors could move about freely. There were a handful of modern structures — trailers and cottages for the archaeologists and other workers — and a small building that housed some of the artifacts discovered at the site that doubled as the administrative center. Pierce headed there first and approached one of the guides, a young man wearing a red T-shirt emblazoned with Cyrillic characters.

The babelfish also had a visual component for translating text, and a quick glance at the phone’s display informed Pierce that the image on the shirt was the logo of ‘The Museum of Man and Nature.’

Pierce introduced himself. “My associates and I are representatives of the World Heritage Committee. We’re here to begin the preliminary evaluation of the nomination.”

It was a cover story, but only partially untrue. Pierce was still a credentialed agent for UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee, the international body dedicated to preserving ancient cultures and combating the illegal trade of antiquities. Arkaim had not been nominated for World Heritage preservation status, but it was a plausible fiction, and more than enough to afford them unrestricted access to the site.

The young man’s look of confusion only deepened when the babelfish device began uttering words in his own language, but as the awkwardness passed he began nodding.

“Follow me,” Pierce heard, as the young man led them from the building.

So far, so good.

The young man led them out across the site, past groups of visitors and toward two structures that resembled Mongolian yurts made out of mud bricks. Although the buildings looked like dwellings preserved from antiquity, they were the most recent additions to the site — replicas of Sintashta houses — and the first step toward a proposed full-scale reproduction of ancient Arkaim. Nearby, a group of young men and women, a few wearing the same T-shirt as their guide, were removing dirt from a shallow trench with garden trowels. Pierce, recalling his own time as an undergrad digging in the dirt, felt a twinge of nostalgia, but his musings were interrupted when a middle-aged man climbed out of the excavation to meet them.

Pierce repeated the introduction he had used with the young guide but before the translation could be supplied, the man spoke in halting English. “World Heritage Committee? United Nations? I did not know we had been nominated.”

The man’s expression was guarded, but it was evident that he considered the nomination of Arkaim a great professional honor. He smiled. “Forgive. I am Sergei Zdanovich. I am… How do you say? The boss, here.”

So much for technology, Pierce thought, tapping a button on the babelfish to mute the feed. He extended his hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Dr. Zdanovich. We’re in the early stages of the nomination. Nothing formal yet. That’s why we’re here.”

“Excellent. Yes. I will give you tour.”

Pierce smiled. “That’s not necessary. In fact, if it’s all the same to you, we’d prefer to just wander around for a while. Take a few pictures. Nothing intrusive, of course.”

Zdanovich registered mild irritation at the suggestion, but then spread his hands in a gesture of accommodation. “Of course.”

“Thank you.” Pierce started to turn away, but then stopped himself as if remembering something. “Oh, I heard that you discovered the entrance to a series of subterranean passages. Could you point me in the right direction?”

The Russian’s frown deepened. “What is name again?”

Pierce sensed the cracks appearing in his cover story, but he answered truthfully. “Professor George Pierce. University of Athens.”

Zdanovich gave a little nod and turned to the young man who had led them to the excavation. He mumbled something in Russian, prompting Pierce to reactivate the babelfish a little too late, then added, “Gennaidy will show you.”

The young man in the red shirt gestured for them to follow and struck out across the site. After a few steps, Pierce glanced back and saw Zdanovich heading toward the administrative center.

“Is that going to be a problem?” Lazarus asked in a low voice.

“Maybe,” Pierce admitted. “Depends on how hard he shakes it.”

“We should have just snuck in after dark,” Fiona whispered.

Although it had been his decision to make the initial survey in the open, Pierce wondered if his young protégé wasn’t right about that. He had considered but rejected a clandestine approach, for the simple reason that the potential risk outweighed the potential reward. They didn’t even know what they were looking for, or if there was anything to be found at all. What they needed more than anything else was time. Unfortunately, Zdanovich was turning out to be Pierce’s worst nightmare come true: a Russian bureaucrat, protecting his little fiefdom.

He tapped the Bluetooth device again to open a direct line to Dourado. “Cintia, can you monitor the site for outgoing phone calls?”

“Piece of cake,” Dourado promised.

“We stick to the plan,” he told the others. “If we find something, we can always try Fiona’s plan.”

Gennaidy, ignorant of his superior’s suspicions, led them across the site, which consisted of bare earth, pock-marked with exploratory trenches. Pierce’s practiced eye spotted the curving foundation of the old city. It wasn’t hard to imagine moving through the city as it had once been, a massive walled citadel rising from the steppe, with streets and channels to supply fresh water. At the outer edge of the circle, on the western side, near what had once been the main entrance, a rope barrier had been erected around a sheet of plywood lying flat on the ground. Gennaidy held the ropes down for them and then pointed to the plywood.

Under there.

Pierce thanked the young man and dismissed him. “We can take it from here.”

Gennaidy appeared confused and uncertain about what to do next, so Lazarus placed a hand on his shoulder and made a gesture that, while not threatening, conveyed the message: Get lost.

As the young man slunk away, Dourado’s voice chirped in Pierce’s ear. “You were right. Zdanovich is calling it in.”

Pierce grimaced. “Keep me posted.” He turned to the others. “The clock is ticking. Let’s get to work.”

TWO

Beneath the plywood, they found a square vertical shaft cut into the stone. The bottom, glistening with seepage, was eight feet down, but there was an opening and a wooden ladder on the east wall of the pit that looked promising. Lazarus opened his backpack and took out four small LED headlamps, which he distributed to the others. He also produced and began snapping together the disassembled pieces of what looked like a metal detector. The device — a Nitek Groundshark — was a portable, ground-penetrating radar unit.

Unlike a metal detector, which could, with varying degrees of success, locate metallic objects buried a foot or so below the surface, the Groundshark’s GPR could detect non-metallic objects, density changes, and void spaces. Any of those might indicate sealed chambers and passages, and the Groundshark could detect them through several feet of solid ground. While ground penetrating radar could not plumb all the secrets of Arkaim, a quick sweep of the site could point the way to those secrets, or confirm that there were none to be found. Once the GPR unit was assembled, they descended the ladder and headed into the passage.

As they moved forward, Pierce moved the Groundshark back and forth, not only across the floor, but also up and down the walls. Although the uniform dimensions of the tunnel bore witness to the labor of the ancient artisans, the meandering course of the tunnel suggested that the workers had enlarged naturally occurring fissures in the limestone, which the GPR revealed to be solid.

After fifty feet, the tunnel opened into a large chamber, with three more passages radiating away in different directions like the spokes of a wheel.

“I’ll sweep this room,” Pierce said. “You guys scout the passages. Be careful. We can’t afford to lose anyone in here.”

“Yes, dad,” Gallo said.

Fiona giggled for a moment, but then seemed to grow more serious. As she studied the passages, contemplating the choices, Pierce saw her lips moving ever so slightly. He exchanged a glance with Gallo, who just nodded, confirming his suspicions.

Fiona was using the Mother Tongue, asking the earth to tell her which way to go. Or trying to, anyway. After a few seconds of this, she started down the middle passage, but whether it was because the ground had spoken to her, or just a lucky guess, there was no telling.

“You think she knows something?” he whispered.

Gallo shrugged. “I wouldn’t bet against her.”

Pierce checked the display on his phone and saw a circle-slash where the signal bars should have been. Zdanovich had likely already discovered that they weren’t there in any official capacity, and might even have contacted the authorities. Pierce didn’t think their deception would warrant an arrest, but they could be kicked off the site and deported.

Gambling on whether or not Fiona had sensed something during her communion with the stone was exactly what he was going to have to do, and time was the currency at stake.

“All in,” he said, heading after the young woman. Gallo and Lazarus fell in behind him.

The passage sloped downward, the gradient slight but constant. The wall curved as they continued onward, spiraling down. It wasn’t perfect evidence of Originator influence, but it was very suggestive.

He quickened his pace, catching up with Fiona, but they were forced to stop. Although the passage continued at least as far as their flashlights could reveal, it was flooded.

“Must be a cave-in further down,” Pierce said. He glanced over at Fiona. “Is there something important down there?”

Fiona shook her head, uncertain. “I’m not… I don’t know what this is. It’s like this whole place is talking to me.” She turned, a guilty look on her face. “Not literally, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I’m not thinking anything, Fi.” Pierce studied the flooded passage, wondering if he should try wading out into it with the GPR unit.

And if I find something, he thought, then what?

“If we could shift whatever’s blocking the passage,” Lazarus said, “it might drain out. A small shaped charge might do the trick.”

“Or it might bring the roof down on our heads,” Pierce countered, shaking his head. “Let’s keep that plan in reserve. Fi, I hate to ask, but do you think you could…” He left the question unfinished, dangling in the air between them.

“Use the Force? That’s why you brought me along, isn’t it?”

Pierce forced a smile. “Can you do it?”

“I can try.” She turned to the flooded passage again, took a deep breath and closed her eyes. A minute passed with no visible effect, then two. Pierce was just about to call the attempt a failure when ripples began to distort the mirror-like surface of the water. Then the flood disappeared, revealing damp stone. Further down the passage, where the water was deeper, the process was more gradual, but the water line dropped. Somewhere further down the tunnel, the dam had broken.

It’s working, Pierce thought. He turned to Fiona, ready to congratulate her when she left off her efforts. He was surprised to find her staring back at him, wide-eyed and horrified.

“It wasn’t me.”

“Not—”

A deep boom, like the inside of a thunderclap, interrupted. The sound was so loud, so intense, that Pierce was knocked off his feet. He lay on the cave floor, stunned, lying beside the others. He struggled to rise, but the disorientation lingered. The ground shook beneath him.

Cracks appeared in the limestone walls, radiating out like tongues of lightning. The air grew thick with grit and dust.

“Fi!” Gallo shouted. “Whatever you’re doing—”

“I’m not doing anything!”

Lazarus’s voice roared above the din. “It’s an earthquake! We need to move!”

The big man reached out from the gloom, pulling Pierce to his feet, but the ground was still lurching back and forth like the deck of a storm-tossed ship. Pierce reached out to Fiona, but another shift threw him against the wall. Lazarus succeeded where he had failed, scooping Fiona up in his arms. “Go!”

Pierce found Gallo leaning against the opposite wall. He took her hand, but before they could start back up the passage, another thunderous detonation wrenched their world sideways. The dust cloud, illuminated by the diffused light of their headlamps, began swirling. A blast of air, like the wind ahead of an approaching subway train, raced down the passage. There could only be one explanation.

“It’s collapsing,” Pierce shouted.

Large pieces of rubble began raining down on them.

“What do we do?” Gallo said.

Pierce turned, whipping her around to face the other direction. “Run!” And then a second later, Pierce yelled again, “Down!”

THREE

Although she had lived most of her life in the stable — geologically speaking — Seattle area, Felice Carter knew an earthquake when she felt one. The floor lurched beneath her, the jolt strong enough to bounce the lab table and everything on it into the air. The heavier pieces of equipment began vibrating across the tabletop. Lighter items — mostly glassware — went flying, shattering on impact with the floor or the walls.

Carter’s first thought was outrage at the hours, days even, worth of research that had just been destroyed. None of the genetic samples or chemical agents were dangerous, but replacing them would be time-consuming and expensive.

Her second thought was that she needed to get to safety.

The floor was still moving, though not with the same violence as the initial bump, and she was able to stay upright. The question was, where to go? She recalled hearing that the safest place to be in an earthquake was a doorway — something about load-bearing walls and the shape of the door frame.

Was that still true when the doorway in question was in a subterranean laboratory, a hundred feet below the foundation of a thousand-plus-year-old tower?

Absent any better options, she decided she should give it a try.

As she reached the open door, hugging the upright frame to stay on her feet, the scientist in her wondered about the epicenter and the magnitude of the temblor. Her field was biology — specifically biochemistry and genetic engineering. Seismology was a different branch of the science tree, but thinking in terms of data and numbers — the universal language of all the sciences — made it seem a little less frightening.

She remembered a few things from her general science courses. Earthquakes occurred when there was movement along fault lines, cracks in the Earth’s crust that were sometimes pushed together or pulled apart by geological forces. The initial jolt at the beginning, when the stored energy in the opposing land masses was released, was the moment of greatest violence — like a stone cast into a lake, disrupting the surface with a chaotic splash. The subsequent shaking was the ripple effect, the shockwave spreading out from the epicenter. That was not to say that the gentler shaking wasn’t dangerous. As long as the earth was moving, there was risk, but Carter took comfort in the fact that the worst had passed. Aside from a few broken test tubes, the damage appeared to be minimal.

Then the lights went out.

The desolate blackness lasted only a fraction of a second before battery-powered emergency lights flashed on, illuminating the path to safety. But they left most of her world shrouded in funereal shadows. She stayed where she was, praying to gods she didn’t even believe in for the ground to stop moving.

One of them must have been listening. Although Carter thought she could still feel the world rocking beneath her, the shattered fragments of glass on the floor laid still. The quake appeared to be over.

She pushed away from the doorframe and hurried down the hall. There would be aftershocks, and she didn’t want to be underground when things started moving again. But getting out of the subterranean complex was not her first priority.

“Cintia?”

“Dr. Carter?” A quiet voice reached out to her from the gloom. “Are you okay?”

Carter felt a surge of relief. “I’m coming.”

A few more steps brought her to Dourado’s office. The room was in disarray, but the strangest part was the absence of light emanating from the multiple LED screens that lined the room. Dourado, her face and fuchsia hair coated with plaster dust, sat in her ergonomic chair surrounded by the lifeless monitors, looking bereft, like someone struck deaf, dumb, and blind.

“Cintia, come on,” Carter urged. “We need to get out of here.”

The computer expert looked up at her and blinked. “The generators should kick on soon.”

“That doesn’t matter. We can’t stay down here.”

“But Dr. Pierce… The team… They need us.”

Carter glanced at the black screens. Dourado’s computers weren’t just magic windows through which she could escape reality. They were her connection to the rest of the team at the Russian archaeological site. More importantly, the computers were the team’s connection to her, their lifeline if something went wrong.

The hardware in the room wouldn’t be of much use to the team or anyone else if the ceiling crashed down on them, though. Carter was about to tell Dourado as much when the screens began lighting up, displaying a welcome message, as the central operating system booted up. The overhead lights flickered to life as well.

Dourado breathed a sigh of relief. “See?”

Carter pursed her lips. “Can’t you do this from your tablet?”

Dourado shook her head. “There are too many systems running. Too much data to manage.”

Carter sank into an empty chair. Dourado was not going to budge, that much was clear. Maybe Pierce would be able to talk sense into her. “How long until you can re-establish contact with them?”

“That’s the other problem. They went underground. We’ll have to wait until they come out. And they don’t even know what’s happening.”

“The earthquake?”

Dourado shook her head. “The Russians. They didn’t buy Dr. Pierce’s cover story. They’re sending FSB officers to detain them.”

Carter forgot all about aftershocks. “And you don’t have any way to contact them?”

“Not until they come up for air.” She frowned at the screens. The welcome message was gone, but now another notification was being displayed:

“And not if I can’t get online.” Dourado grabbed a wireless keyboard off the nearest desk and began typing.

Carter tried to follow what she was doing, but the dialogue boxes and command prompts were popping up and disappearing too quickly for her to make sense out of any of it. “Maybe the quake knocked out the Internet.”

“It did,” Dourado confirmed. “Local lines are down. But we have a satellite back-up. No way the quake touched that.”

A few seconds later, a new message appeared:

Dourado pumped the air with her fist and then resumed typing. A new page opened on one of the screens, a blank white square, just waiting to be filled up with information. After about thirty seconds, more words appeared:

Dourado spat out an oath in her native Portuguese, and started over, but the results were the same.

“Is the satellite out, too?” Carter asked.

“No. I mean, I don’t know.”

“Maybe the lines are jammed,” Carter suggested. “Too many people trying to use it at the same time. That’s a thing, right?”

“For cellular and land-lines, yes.” Dourado’s expression twisted in disdain. “This is something else. Let me try something.”

The woman’s fingers flew over the keys and then she pumped her fist in success. “Yes! I’m on a restricted military satellite. Let’s see how bad this earthquake was.”

She entered a new command, and the white window was replaced with the logo of the United States Geological Survey. A moment later, it was replaced by a map of the world, with the continents rendered in white and the oceans in gray. Both land and sea were marked with dots of varying size.

The dots, Carter realized, were individual earthquakes recorded by USGS instruments over the course of a week, and the sizes of the dots were a measure of the respective intensity of each quake. According to the legend at the bottom of the map, yellow dots indicated quakes older than twenty-four hours, tan meant quakes less than a day old, and red was reserved for quakes less than an hour old.

All the dots on the map were red.

“That’s not…” She glanced at Dourado. “Is that right? All those quakes happened at the same time?”

The other woman didn’t reply, but continued to stare at the map, eyes wide in horrified disbelief.

Carter gave the map a second look. There were several red dots, many of them overlapping, up and down the Italian peninsula. They ranged from small to moderate in size, which Carter supposed was a good thing. There were a few very large red dots scattered around the globe, mostly along the Pacific Rim, but by far the largest concentration of quakes was in an area comprising Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and all of Europe, as far east as the Urals.

Carter let out a gasp as the significance of that hit her. Now she understood Dourado’s concern. A medium-sized red dot covered the border region of Russia and Kazakhstan — the area where the Cerberus team was operating.

Underground.

“I’m sure they’re alright.” The platitude sounded hollow in her own ears. She swallowed, feeling helpless, and turned back to the map. “Did all these earthquakes really happen at the same time?”

Dourado tapped a few keys, opening a sidebar next to the map. There was a list of quakes, with detailed information about the location, depth, magnitude, and time of occurrence, and while the screen only showed the first ten or so quakes, one commonality was apparent.

Every single quake had occurred at almost the same time: 1000 hours UTC.

As if reading Carter’s mind, Dourado brought up several different news feeds from all over the world on different screens. The BBC newsroom was in chaotic disarray, the anchors apologizing for the lack of information and admitting that they were unsure if their broadcast was even hitting the airwaves. The American 24-hour news networks seemed to have a better handle on the situation, with bold graphics and screen crawls repeating what little they knew. Reports were still coming in. Most of the quakes, including the one that had rocked Rome, were minor—5.1 magnitude or less. Enough to break a few windows and crack the sidewalks, but not enough to cause major structural damage. Less developed areas in North Africa and the Middle East, where building codes were lax if they existed at all, had not fared as well. Some places had suffered extensive damage. The number of casualties was unknown, but estimates ran to seven figures. The one clear message they were sending out confirmed what Carter had surmised from the USGS map. The quakes, hundreds of them, had occurred simultaneously, and that was indeed remarkable.

A bleach-blonde anchor on CNN asked her guest, a seismologist, about it.

“It is unusual, Ashley,” the man replied. “Large earthquakes can be felt around the world. The magnitude nine Indian Ocean earthquake in 2004 caused the whole planet to vibrate.”

“But that was just one quake,” Blonde Ashley said.

“Right. We’re breaking new ground with this one…if you’ll pardon the pun. This wasn’t a domino effect, with one quake triggering others. These were simultaneous earthquakes, and that’s something we can’t explain.”

Carter had heard enough. She turned to Dourado and made a cutting gesture, a signal to mute the audio. “We need to look into this.”

The other woman returned a blank look. “Our people might be in trouble. That’s the only thing that matters right now.”

“And what are we supposed to do to help them?” Carter shot back.

“What are we supposed to do about that?” Dourado asked, pointing at the screens. “It’s terrible, but natural disasters aren’t our job.” She winced, as if regretting the comment. “I suppose we could coordinate with the Red Cross, but—”

“Is it?” Carter asked. “A natural disaster, I mean?”

Dourado’s expression changed to reflect confusion. “What else could it be? You don’t think…” She trailed off as if unable to even speculate about Carter’s thought process.

“You heard what he said. Simultaneous earthquakes don’t happen. Not naturally. This is something else.”

“What?”

“A new weapon. Some kind of earthquake machine. Runaway fracking. I don’t know. But we need to find out.”

Dourado gasped and whispered something to herself. She swung her attention back to the screens and began entering information. After a few seconds, a list of search results for ‘earthquake machine’ appeared on one of the screens. One particular term stood out to Carter. “HAARP?”

“It stands for High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. It’s a U.S. military research facility in Alaska, supposedly built to study the ionosphere for the purpose of improving radio communications.”

“Supposedly,” Carter echoed. “What was the real purpose?”

“Well, if you believe the conspiracy theorists, they were trying to build a weapon that could create extreme weather, control people’s minds, set the atmosphere on fire, or…” She allowed a dramatic pause. “Cause earthquakes.”

Carter chose her next question carefully. “Is that what you think it is?”

“I believe that powerful people would like to be able to do those things, and that the U.S. government could probably do some of it if they wanted to.”

Carter couldn’t disagree with the latter sentiment, but that didn’t mean she was ready to get fitted for a tin-foil top hat. “I’ll take a look at it. Can you send these to my tablet?”

Her tablet was back in her lab, which was still trashed. She wondered again at the overall wisdom of staying underground, but then decided that Dourado was right. Cerberus HQ was the place they needed to be.

“On second thought, I’ll just work on it here, if that’s okay with you.”

The other woman appeared somewhat discomfited at the prospect of sharing a workspace, so Carter added, “If there are any aftershocks, we may need to evacuate. Probably best that we stay together. And I want to be here if…when…you make contact with the team.”

Dourado gave an unenthusiastic shrug. “I guess you’re right.” Her gaze flickered to a news broadcast and then her eyes went wide. Carter turned and saw a message displayed in bold graphics: ‘Sun Stands Still?’

Dourado restored the audio.

“…unconfirmed reports from observers that the sunrise on the East Coast was late.” The anchor drew out the last word for emphasis. “By at least a full minute. John, is that even possible?”

The guest commentator shook his head. “Ashley, sunrise and sunset times vary from place to place because of the Earth’s curvature, so it’s not unusual for there to be disagreement between the time when the Internet says the sun should rise in a given place, and when you actually see it happen.”

“But John, these reports are coming from observatories up and down the East Coast. They’re saying that the sunrise was late. Now, we all know that it’s the Earth that moves, not the sun—”

“Most of us,” the seismologist said with a nervous laugh. “There are still a few Flat-Earthers out there.”

Ashley pressed on undaunted. “People are asking, is there some connection to these earthquakes? Did the Earth stop moving?”

John shook his head. “No, Ashley. That’s just not possible. Look, people are freaked out right now. I get it. This is nothing more than a misinterpretation of the data. I promise you, there’s a rational, perfectly boring explanation for this.”

Carter wasn’t so sure. She turned back to Dourado. “Something’s going on. Something big, and we need to figure out what it is before it happens again.”

FOUR

Lazarus hunched his shoulders forward, sheltering Fiona from the debris raining down, and hurried down the passage, trying to outrun the collapse. Fist-sized chunks pelted him with increasing frequency. Each impact felt like a sledgehammer pounding his body. He took no comfort in the fact of his own invincibility. If a larger chunk came down on them, putting himself between it and Fiona would make little difference to her.

“Look out!”

Lazarus glanced back in response to Fiona’s shout. Through the haze of headlamp-lit swirling dust, he could see the ceiling coming down like a gigantic flyswatter.

He turned his eyes forward again and realized that the collapsing section stretched out ahead of them, well past Pierce and Gallo, who were a few steps ahead of them.

He ground his teeth together and braced himself.

Maybe it wasn’t as heavy as it looked.

Maybe he could buy Fiona the fraction of a second needed to get out in front of the cave in.

Probably not.

More chunks of stone rumbled to the ground all around them, bouncing like rubber balls…

No, not bouncing. Rising.

It was as if the world had turned upside down. The cascade of debris reversed direction, falling up instead of down, coming together, coalescing into…

He looked down at the girl in his arms. Fiona’s lips were moving, speaking ancient and powerful words.

A tall figure, like an enormous statue, materialized from the gloom, hands raised to catch the falling slab. Lazarus ran past without slowing, but out of the corner of his eye, he saw the golem compressed like a gigantic spring under the weight of the collapsing ceiling.

A loud grinding noise chased after them, then the boom of an explosion. Another blast of wind buffeted him, pelting him with stones and filling the passage with choking dust, but the thing he dreaded most did not occur.

Fiona’s golem had saved them.

Blinded by the debris cloud, Lazarus skidded to a complete stop. The ground was no longer shaking underfoot, and the cave-in appeared to have stopped, leaving the passage quiet.

“I think it’s over,” Fiona whispered.

Lazarus nodded. “Good job back there.”

She started to say something then broke into a coughing fit.

“Cover your mouth,” he advised. “Don’t breathe this shit in.” He peered into the haze and saw a faint glow ahead. “Pierce! Sound off!”

Pierce’s voice, faint and broken by spasms of coughing, reached out to him. “We’re okay.”

Lazarus set Fiona on her feet and then guided her forward through the settling dust until they reached Pierce and Gallo.

“It wasn’t me,” Fiona croaked. “I didn’t cause this.”

“I know, Fi.” Pierce gave her shoulder a pat, but Lazarus detected a note of uncertainty in his tone. Something had caused the cave-in, and the timing of it was an uncomfortable coincidence. “All the same,” he added, “Let’s…ah, watch what we say down here.”

Fiona frowned but nodded her assent.

“How far down do you think we are?” Gallo asked.

“I’d say we only moved about fifty yards…” Pierce glanced at Lazarus for confirmation.

“Fifty max,” Lazarus said. “Maybe less.”

“Given the slope of the passage, I’d say we’re thirty feet down.”

“Doesn’t sound so bad when you say it like that,” Gallo remarked. “I suppose we’re going to have to burrow our way out like gophers.”

“If we have to,” Pierce said. He surveyed the area. The dust was settling, revealing a rubble-strewn passage that continued deeper into the earth. “Since we’re here, we might as well take a look around. Maybe there’s a back door.”

Gallo raised a dubious eyebrow. “You ever heard the saying: ‘If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging’?”

“Will Rogers.” Pierce managed a grin. “But I’m an archaeologist, Gus. ‘Dig deeper’ is always the right answer.”

Gallo rolled her eyes, then turned to Fiona. “Fi, honey, you said this passage spoke to you. What did you mean?”

“It was like a…gut feeling. I don’t know how to describe it.”

“How about now?”

“It’s still down there.”

“Dig deeper,” Pierce said. “This is what we came for.”

Whatever the cause, the effects of the cave-in seemed less pronounced the deeper they went, but there were still sections of the passage so choked with rubble that they had to crawl on hands and knees, single file, to get through. At each obstacle, Pierce shot Fiona a questioning look, and the answer was always the same.

Down.

As the young woman’s certainty about what lay below them increased, so did Lazarus’s apprehension. The safety of the team was his responsibility, and the deeper underground they went, the harder it would be to do his job.

The curvature of the passage was gradual but constant. They were in a descending spiral, orbiting the center of the old city above. The air was musty, the walls still damp from being submerged. Then some two hundred yards from the site of the cave-in, the passage turned inward and opened into another open chamber, more than a hundred feet in diameter.

“If my mental GPS is still working,” Pierce said, shining his light up at the vaulted ceiling. Despite being riddled with cracks, it was mostly intact. “We’re right under the center of Arkaim.”

Gallo was more interested in the walls, specifically, a uniform line ringing the chamber, about eight feet above the floor. Below that line, the walls were still wet. “Where did all the water go?”

Lazarus looked around for the answer to that question. The room had been flooded with enough water to fill a short course swimming pool. For that much fluid to drain out so quickly would require a sizable opening, maybe another tunnel leading to a more extensive cave network, which in turn might mean a path back to the surface. But there did not appear to be any other exits from the chamber.

Fiona said nothing, but walked out into the middle of the vast hall, as if drawn to an invisible beacon in the exact center of the room. “Here,” she called out, kneeling and gesturing with palms down. “It’s here. I’m going to try something.”

“Fi, are you sure that’s wise?” Pierce said. “After what happened earlier—”

“I told you. That wasn’t me.”

“Let her try, George,” Gallo said. “It’s not like our situation can get much worse.”

Pierce’s frown indicated that he disagreed, but he took a step back and nodded to Fiona.

She turned slowly, as if trying to find a precise position, then her lips began moving. At first, Lazarus couldn’t hear what she was saying, but after a moment, he began to feel a deep hum, like the notes of a bass violin reverberating out from her chest cavity, building in intensity.

Then the floor began to move.

He shifted his stance, spreading his feet apart, as if he was standing on the deck of a storm tossed ship. Pierce and Gallo did the same, but after the initial lurch, the motion smoothed out.

The stone floor began rotating and descending at the same time, like a bolt slowly screwing itself deeper into the Earth’s crust. After a full turn, the movement ceased. The passage through which they had entered was now about ten feet above the floor, but several more openings were revealed, spaced out evenly around the edge of the chamber.

Fiona was grinning. “Told you.”

“Well done.” Pierce stepped forward and gave her a nod. “Sorry I doubted you.” He turned, probing the enlarged chamber with his lamp. “I think we can safely say this architecture is not consistent with the Sintashta culture.”

“Just as we suspected,” Gallo said. “Arkaim was built atop the ruins of a much older civilization.”

“The Originators,” Pierce confirmed. “The Sintashta must have known about it. It would explain Arkaim’s circular design. But I doubt anyone has been here in thousands of years. That earthquake probably shook things up, activated this elevator mechanism and drained the passage.”

Fiona shone her light down one of the passages. “That’s the one.”

There was nothing different about the opening, but she had not led them astray yet. “We need to hurry, though. I think this place has an automatic reset.”

As if on cue, the floor shuddered and started to move again, rising this time, as it rotated in a counter-clockwise direction.

“Go!” Lazarus shouted. He scooped Fiona up in his arms and sprinted across the turning surface. Pierce and Gallo were right behind him, following his lead as he adjusted course every few steps to keep the correct passage in view, even as the rising floor began to eclipse the opening.

He reached the entrance with plenty of time to spare, but in the brief moment it took him to set Fiona down, the opening moved sideways several feet and closed another six inches. Fiona dropped flat and scrambled forward, plunging head first into the passage.

The floor kept moving beneath him and Lazarus had to keep walking forward just to stay in front of the opening, which appeared to be sinking as the ground rose beneath him. The top of the passage was like a slow motion guillotine, a rough stone blade that would slice through anything caught between it and the floor of the chamber.

Gallo arrived next.

“Dive for it,” he shouted, guiding her headfirst into the passage.

The opening was just three feet high, the gap shrinking by inches with each passing second. He took another step forward, reached back for Pierce and propelled him through. The moving floor caught Pierce’s shirt in a scissor pinch, but Lazarus gave him a hard push that ripped him free of the trapped fabric, and Pierce vanished into the passage.

Two feet now.

Pierce’s face appeared in the shrinking gap, his headlamp shining into Lazarus’s face. “Hurry.”

But Lazarus knew the chance to slip through had already passed. He shrugged off his backpack and shoved it into the opening. Twelve inches. Not enough.

He dropped flat and kicked the pack. The contents shifted, and the heavy duty nylon scraped through. He snatched his foot back as six inches became five…four.

“Erik!” Pierce cried out.

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll find anoth—”

His shout bounced off the blank stone wall as the gap vanished, leaving him alone and cut off.

FIVE

It did not take long at all for Carter to recognize that she was out of her depth. She was able to muddle through the wealth of information, particularly the official documentation that included very precise data she could verify for herself, but her unfamiliarity with the subject left her feeling underequipped. Distinguishing fact from fiction, where the more extravagant claims of the conspiracy theorists were concerned, was not her forte.

The stated goal of the HAARP project, Carter learned, was to use radio waves to excite plasma in the ionosphere — a five-hundred-mile-thick region of the Earth’s atmosphere, which began almost fifty miles above the surface — and then observe the results. In layman’s terms, the HAARP scientists were using a thirty-three-acre microwave oven to set the upper atmosphere on fire, just to see what would happen.

It was easy to see how people could be alarmed by that prospect. A single match was all it took to start a raging forest fire.

The idea had originated in the 1980s from an unlikely source, a physicist working for a petroleum company who was looking for an alternative means of transporting Alaska’s energy bounty out of the remote wilderness, to the port city of Valdez, hundreds of miles away. The proposed idea was to use that energy on site to power a microwave beam which would excite plasma in the ionosphere. How the energy would be recovered was not apparent, but the idea of heating the ionosphere opened the door to other intriguing possibilities of interest to the Cold War era military.

With precisely aimed radio waves, it might be possible to nudge tropical cyclones on the other side of the world, or see through solid ground to detect hidden enemy bunkers and missile silos. The potential was significant enough to prompt the construction of the quarter-billion dollar antenna array, but whether it had delivered on any of those extravagant aims remained uncertain. The scientists denied that such lines of research were being pursued, and the conspiracy theorists and critics made claims that defied the limits of reason.

According to official sources, HAARP was an enormous antenna array — one hundred and eighty antennas, lined up in a thirty-three acre rectangle — capable of both receiving and transmitting high frequency radio waves between 2.7 and 10 megahertz. By contrast, commercial FM radio stations operated between 88 and 100 megahertz, and military-grade radar frequencies reached into the gigahertz range, as did most microwave ovens. Even if the official specs were understating the output potential of the HAARP array, there were limits that could not be exceeded. HAARP was a powerful antenna broadcasting a weak signal, into a region of space that was bombarded by broad spectrum electro-magnetic radiation. Every second of every day in its 4.6 billion years of existence, the sun showered the Earth with 170 billion megawatts of EM radiation. It collided with gas molecules in the upper atmosphere, stripping away electrons and creating bands of ionized plasma visible to the naked eye. The effect was known as the Aurora Borealis in the north, and the less well-known Aurora Australis in the south. By contrast, HAARP’s maximum output was 3.6 megawatts.

HAARP could be compared to a struck match, but the ionosphere wasn’t a dry forest — it was already on fire. One more little flame wouldn’t make much difference.

But there were claims that Carter could not ignore. A Russian military journal had warned that heating the atmosphere might result in an electron cascade capable of destabilizing or flipping the Earth’s magnetic poles, which would wreak havoc with electronic communications and even leave the planet’s surface vulnerable to deadly cosmic radiation. Another claim, which under any other circumstances would have seemed ludicrous, was that HAARP could be used to transform the upper atmosphere into a lens to redirect solar radiation, amplifying or refracting sunlight in a way similar to what had been reported on the East Coast of the United States.

Had someone, using the HAARP array in Alaska or something like it on an even bigger scale, triggered the global explosion of earthquakes and the unusual solar event? Based on her understanding of the science, it was unlikely but not unthinkable.

“I need a consult,” she said after ten minutes of reading. “With an expert.”

Dourado, who had spent the time immersed in the alternate reality of cyberspace, glanced over. “What kind of expert?”

“Physics,” Carter decided.

“You’ll need to narrow it down a bit,” Dourado said.

The question flummoxed Carter for a moment. What sort of expertise did she need? “I need someone to help me make sense of HAARP, but who can also tell me a little about the earthquakes and the solar event.”

“So an expert but not a specialist.” Dourado scanned through several pages of virtual information. “Most fields of physics deal with theoretical applications, so we’ll focus on applied physics. I’ll cross-reference with people who worked on HAARP or similar projects.”

A list of names appeared on the screen, along with a brief curriculum vitae detailing academic affiliations, areas of research, notable papers written, and significant awards won. There was an additional notation at the end of each listing, the words ‘Recruitment code’, followed by a three digit number.

“Recruitment code? What’s that?”

“This is the database of scientists who might be valuable to the Herculean Society. That’s how Dr. Pierce found you.”

Carter had not been aware of it, but it seemed like a logical arrangement. “What do the numbers mean?”

“There’s an algorithm… It’s kind of complicated, but the short answer is that the computer looks at a variety of factors.”

“What kind of factors?”

“Like I said, it’s complicated. Some geniuses are easier to work with than others. And there are a few I wouldn’t trust with the key to the washroom. If someone scores above a certain number, we make sure that they receive funding or employment with one of our subsidiaries. All very discreet of course. It takes more than a high score to get admitted to the inner circle.”

Carter wondered what her recruitment score had been, but thought better of asking. “I’m not looking to hire anyone. I just need to ask a few questions.”

Dourado gestured to the screen. “Take your pick.”

“Can you organize it by proximity? I think this is going to take more than a phone call.”

The page refreshed, displaying candidates from across Europe. One name stood out to her, a Japanese scientist — Ishiro Tanaka — working in Geneva, Switzerland. Although his CV was extensive, including eighteen months at HAARP, his recruitment score was conspicuously lower than the others.

“Tanaka’s in Geneva,” Carter murmured. “CERN is in Geneva.”

CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research — was one of the world’s leading scientific institutions. It was also the location of the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator ring twenty miles around, where physicists tried to, among other things, recreate the Big Bang and produce miniature black holes.

“It is,” Dourado confirmed, “But Tanaka works for Marcus Fallon at Tomorrowland.”

“Fallon? I feel like I should know that name.”

“He’s like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates all rolled into one.”

Carter, a native of Seattle, recognized the last name, but the other two were no more familiar than Fallon’s. “I guess I’m a little behind the times. How long would it take me to get there?”

Dourado began checking travel information. “It looks like the earthquakes have everything screwed up right now. The trains are all on hold until the track repairs and inspections are complete. Flights are backed up. No word on how long that will last.”

“What about the roads? Can I drive it?”

Dourado brought up a map with the most direct route from Rome to Geneva marked in blue. On the map, it looked like a short distance; Switzerland and Italy were neighbors, but the two cities were separated by more than five hundred miles. “No major road closures being reported, but it’s a good nine hours.”

“I can always listen to an audiobook.”

“Maybe I can pull a few strings. Geneva is also where the International Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders are headquartered. Maybe I can get you on a relief flight.”

Carter kept staring at the map. “Cintia, can you put the earthquake map up again?”

Dourado did so with a keystroke. Carter moved closer, staring at the clusters of dots.

There it is. Why didn’t I see this before?

“Does it look to you like Geneva could be the center of the earthquake activity?”

“I…guess?”

“The quakes all happened at about 1000 UTC. What’s the time difference for Switzerland?”

“Same as here. Plus two hours during the summer.”

“So the quakes happened at noon. When the sun was directly overhead, more or less.” One of the problems with working in an underground laboratory was that it was easy to lose track of the time. “What’s the time difference between Switzerland and New York?”

“Six hours,” Dourado said, without having to think about it.

“So the quakes were hitting the East Coast at about six a.m. Shortly before sunrise. Which according to multiple reports, was more than a minute late.”

“You think there’s a connection?”

Carter continued to stare at the map. “Tell me about this man Tanaka works for.”

“Marcus Fallon. Easy. He’s kind of a hero of mine. The ultimate tech guy. He invented The Stork.”

Carter shook her head to signal her ignorance.

“‘He brings bundles of joy!’” Dourado seemed to be mimicking an announcer’s voice. “No? The Stork is a robotic aerial parcel delivery system…a package drone. It’s revolutionized online retail.” Dourado shrugged then went on. “Fallon is on the forefront of robotics research and AI. They use his software in self-driving cars. But his real passion is space colonization. His facility in Geneva, Tomorrowland, is a test laboratory focusing on robotic systems for building space stations and terraforming other planets.”

“So he would have use for someone like Tanaka. Does he have any military contracts?”

“I don’t know, but he’s an American living in Switzerland, so I’d say probably not.” Dourado narrowed her eyes. “As much as I don’t want to believe it, if anyone was capable of building a bigger version of HAARP, it would be Marcus Fallon. He’s got the genius and the money to do it.”

“I’m not accusing him, Cintia. I just want to ask a few questions.”

“That’s not what I mean. If he is responsible for what happened today, he’s not going to put out the welcome mat for you. Maybe you should wait until…” She left the sentence unfinished, but it was easy enough to figure out what she had left unsaid.

“I’m sure we’ll hear from them soon.” Carter gave her a patient but reassuring smile. “Look, it’s probably nothing. I’ll ask Tanaka my questions, and that will probably be the end of it. But if something more is going on, every second might count. Saving the world is what we do, right?”

SIX

The four-foot drop to the passage’s limestone floor knocked the wind out of Fiona. Before she could recover, Gallo landed on top of her, slamming her down a second time. She lay there stunned for several seconds, aware of the chaos behind her but unable to do anything to help. The wall blocking the end of the passage continued to move for a few more seconds as the chamber floor finished its rotation, then all was still. As Pierce turned and sagged against the wall, Fiona realized that Lazarus was no longer with them.

Without any hesitation, she began speaking the words — the same words that had come to her almost unbidden in the chamber above.

In her efforts to unlock the Mother Tongue, Fiona had operated from the assumption that the Siletz tribal language, which her grandmother had taught her, contained echoes of the original master language, much the same way that Romance languages — Spanish, Italian, French, and others — were connected to Latin roots. Drawing out those traces was a process of trial and error, but she had achieved some success by chanting old tribal songs and prayers, while focusing on a specific task. It was like trying to figure out the solution to a combination lock by turning the dial and listening for the clicks of the internal mechanism.

The correct words were only part of the solution. There was also a mental component to it. The phrase that brought golems to life was simple, but the shape and size of the stone automatons was variable, a function of her focused intent.

As she spoke, using every word and phrase she could remember from her tribal language that had anything at all to do with opening doors or making stones move, she closed her eyes and tried to visualize the passage as it had been only a few moments before. She imagined the rock floor transforming into something as insubstantial as smoke, and Lazarus stepping through to rejoin them.

Nothing happened.

Nothing was going to happen.

“It’s not working.”

It wasn’t me.

“Try again.” Pierce said. “You made it work before.”

She shook her head.

“Erik is trapped up there,” Pierce insisted. “We can’t leave him.”

“I know.” Her voice was sharper than she intended. She took a deep breath, trying to quell her rising panic.

George put a hand on her shoulder and asked, “What’s different now?”

“I’m too far away.”

“You were standing in the center,” Gallo said. “That’s important?”

“I think so.”

“You also knew where to go. And which passage to take.” Gallo looked down the new passageway. “How about now?”

Fiona realized that her concern for Lazarus had blinded her to the subtle sensation that had guided her earlier. She took another calming breath, closed her eyes, and reached out for it again. She had been exaggerating a little when she had said that the place was speaking to her. It wasn’t anything quite so overt. The feeling was more akin to an urge, like irresistible curiosity. And as she pushed down her concern for Lazarus, the feeling returned.

She turned and faced down the passage. “We need to keep going.”

Gallo glanced over at Pierce. “I hate to say it, but I think you were right, George. We need to keep digging.”

George looked back at the sealed passage behind them, and then nodded. “If anyone can take care of himself, it’s Erik.”

“I think when we find what we’re looking for, we’ll be able to get him out of there.”

He hefted the scuffed backpack onto his shoulder and gestured for her to lead the way. “I believe you.”

As before, the passage followed a gradual but constant curve, spiraling down, auguring deeper and deeper into the limestone karst beneath the ruins of Arkaim. The further they traveled, the more convinced Fiona was that they were on the right track. She was worried about Lazarus, but she also believed that the only way to help him was to find whatever the ancient Originators had concealed deep underground. She just wished there was a way to let him know that he had not been forgotten.

After what felt like fifteen minutes of walking, the passage opened up, as if the spiraling borehole had intersected an enormous underground void. The passage was still there, only now it was more of a balcony cut into the wall of a circular chamber, curling around it like the threads on a screw. Stalactites and flowstone cascades hung down from the ceiling like extrusions of cooling candle wax, but otherwise, the walls and ceiling were artificially smooth.

Fiona approached the edge and shone her light into the darkness below. Something glinted up at her, like a single star twinkling in the night sky. Pierce and Gallo joined her, and two more stars appeared — their headlamps reflecting from the still surface of a pool.

“That’s where we have to go,” she told them. “It’s down there.”

“What’s down there?” Pierce pressed, but she had no answer for him.

The balcony — more of a ramp — corkscrewed around three more times before disappearing beneath the surface of the pool. Pierce stopped at the water’s edge, gazing into it, but the mirror-like surface revealed nothing of what lay beneath. He turned away and shone his light on the wall to their left. “It looks like the water level fluctuates quite a bit. Probably with the seasons. Could have been the city’s water reservoir.”

“No.” Fiona shook her head. “I mean, it might have been that, but it’s something else, too.” She turned so that she was facing the center of the pool. “That’s where I have to be. This whole place revolves around it like an axis.”

“Looks pretty deep,” Gallo said. She nodded to Pierce. “I don’t suppose there’s an inflatable raft in that pack.”

“We’ll have to put that on the list for next time.” George gave a nod to Fiona. “But we don’t need one.”

Fiona smiled and lifted a victorious finger. “Now this I can handle.” Then she focused on the water and whispered, “Emet.”

It was the Hebrew word for ‘truth,’ but like many other words in that language, it had deep roots in the Mother Tongue. Emet was part of the longer phrase versatu elid vas re’eish clom, emet, which, when combined with a focused intention, could bring golems to life, though emet was usually enough to do the trick, if her head was clear.

The perfect mirror-like surface of the pool was shattered by dozens of ripples, which intensified into a churning froth. Pierce took a step back as water splashed onto the walkway. “You’d think I would get used to this, but every time I see it, I’m impressed all over again.”

Fiona smiled, but tried to ignore him as she held the Golem’s image in her mind’s eye. Pieces of rock — some as big as monster truck tires, some mere grains of sand — came together to animate the inanimate.

A colossal man-shape erupted from the water, soaking the three figures on the walkway. Most of the golem was submerged, everything below the middle of its massive chest. The top of its head was more than twenty feet above the surface, suggesting the pool itself was at least twice as deep. An arm rose out of the water, a massive hand made of irregular stones cemented together with thick sediment. It reached out for Fiona.

She didn’t flinch. It wouldn’t hurt her; it couldn’t hurt her. Despite its monstrous proportions, the hand, along with the rest of the golem, was an extension of her own consciousness.

The hand came down in front of her, palm up, as if extending an invitation. She stepped onto it, then turned to Pierce and Gallo. “Coming?”

The two exchanged a look, a silent dare perhaps, then joined her on the golem’s open palm. Fiona barely had to think it, and the golem was moving, twisting its body and bearing them out to the center of the chamber, right where Fiona knew they needed to be.

“What the hell is that?” Pierce whispered.

A metallic sphere the size of a softball hovered just a few inches above the surface. Despite the disturbance caused by the golem’s emergence from the pool, there was no trace of moisture on the object.

“I think it’s what we came here for,” Fiona said, reaching out for it.

Pierce caught her wrist. “Slow down. We don’t know what that thing is.”

“It’s safe.” She couldn’t explain how she knew it, she just did. “Trust me.”

“You know I do.” Pierce let go. “I also know your father will throttle me if I let anything happen to you.”

“That’s probably true,” she said with a grin. As she started to reach for it again, something broke the surface beside the object. It was brown and shiny, segmented like a serving platter-sized cockroach. Pierce pulled her hand back, and this time, she didn’t protest. The creature disappeared with a faint splash.

“Okay. Gross. What was that?” Fiona pointed where the creature had submerged.

“Some kind of subterranean crayfish,” Pierce said. “Probably harmless, but let’s not tempt fate.” He reached out for the orb. “I’ll just grab the thing and you can—”

Behind them, Gallo let out a yelp. Fiona glanced back just in time to see her punt a large arthropod, which had climbed out of the pool and onto the golem’s hand. The kick sent it flying, but even as it sailed away, Fiona spotted three more of them crawling up the stone colossus’s forearm.

They were much bigger than she’d first thought, with three-foot-long segmented bodies connected to the eighteen inch-wide carapaces. Dozens of six-inch long legs protruded from the bodies — they reminded Fiona of Freddy Krueger’s knife-blade glove both in appearance and the way they moved. The creatures looked like a cross between a pre-Cambrian trilobite and a giant centipede.

Only bigger. Much bigger.

Two more of the creatures appeared on the golem’s fingertips.

“Fi,” George said. “Can the big guy lend us an assist?”

Fiona nodded and a simple thought command, practically a reflex, caused the golem to raise its other hand out of the water. It began sweeping the creatures off itself the way she might brush lint from a sweater. Unfortunately, the crawling things were on that arm as well, and dozens more of them swarmed across the golem’s shoulders.

“Crap,” she muttered. “I thought that would work.”

“Fi!” Pierce kicked at another of the creatures racing toward her, but after sliding just a few inches, the thing dug its claws in the golem and held on.

Fiona sent another mental command to the golem, shifting the hand on which they stood closer to the hovering orb, so close that the hand bumped against it.

The sphere didn’t move. Despite the fact that there was nothing visibly supporting the strange metal ball, it was as immovable as Fort Knox. She tried again, willing the golem’s hand to slide underneath the object, but instead of moving the sphere, the hand was forced under the surface. Cold water sloshed over her feet, and with it came several more of the giant arthropods. She commanded the golem to raise its hand, but as soon as it encountered the sphere, it was stopped cold.

“This could be a problem.” She knelt down and put her hands on the sphere — it wasn’t solid, more like a woven wire mesh — and even though she knew it would be futile, she tried to lift it.

Nope. The sphere was as unyielding as a mountain.

The answer hit her like a slap. This was the center. The axis.

As Gallo and George kicked the creatures back, she recited the same chant she had used to open the passage above.

For a fleeting instant, she felt the orb change, becoming light and pliable. Her fingers dimpled the surface, crushing it, as if it was no more substantial than a paper lantern.

Then darkness rushed up out of it and swallowed her whole.

SEVEN

For a long time after the floor stopped moving, Lazarus remained still. There was a chance that his team would find the means to activate the mechanism controlling the ancient elevator. In fact, he knew they would exhaust every effort to do so, and if and when they succeeded, he knew he would have to be ready to move. After five silent minutes, however, he began considering his options.

The single passage back to the surface beckoned him. While it was true that tons of earth and rock now filled that tunnel, he could not ignore the most obvious route back to the surface. It might take days for him to dig through, weeks even, most of it spent in total darkness since the battery on his headlamp would only last a few hours at best, but time was something of which he had plenty. Such was the nature of his curse. He was a regen, virtually indestructible.

His fingers would crack and bleed from tearing and digging, but then they would heal and he would keep going. He would suffer dehydration and starvation. His body would begin breaking down fat reserves and muscle tissue, and then when there was nothing left, his organs would fail and he would die, but then he would wake up, and begin again. To say that it would be unpleasant was the worst kind of understatement, but there were worse ways to die over and over again. He had once spent four days at the bottom of a lake in Africa, drowning, then coming back to life only to drown again. That experience, in part, had prompted him to change his last name from Somers to Lazarus, after the Biblical personage who had died and spent four days in a tomb before being brought back.

He wondered how many days he would spend in this tomb?

The regen serum he had been exposed to, many years before, promoted rapid cellular growth — healing — but it was not a pain-free process. Every single test subject who received the serum had experienced total mental breakdown from the unimaginable pain associated with recovery from mortal wounds. He had flirted with that rabid madness once or twice himself in the early days. But he had returned from that dark abyss through intense mental discipline cultivated since early childhood.

Rage was something he knew how to master.

Even so, being buried alive would test his discipline, and push the limits of what he knew he could endure.

But what other choice did he have?

He wondered what the others were doing, whether they were still trying to find a way to reverse what had happened, or if they had resumed exploring the ancient city. Would they find another exit? If not, their situation might prove much more dire than his.

He decided to have another look around the chamber. Perhaps they had missed something in their initial hasty survey. Unless they had misread the signs, the earthquake had caused the ancient elevator to cycle the first time. Maybe there was another way to trigger it again, something simpler than an incantation in the Mother Tongue.

He moved around the circumference of the chamber, scrutinizing the smooth walls and brushing away pieces of rubble to see if a fulcrum release trigger or some other mechanism lay concealed beneath. When his search proved fruitless, he returned to the center and began searching the place where Fiona had stood.

Nothing.

“Looks like I’m going to have to dig,” he muttered.

Despite being barely louder than a whisper, the sound of his voice echoed back at him, disrupting the unearthly silence that he hadn’t even been aware of. Then, the floor began moving again.

Lazarus felt a surge of hope. Was that it? Was the mechanism activated by sounds — any sound, not just the Mother Tongue — emanating from the exact center of the chamber?

The question of how it operated seemed less important than the bigger question of whether he ought to go through. As the floor rumbled through its downward cycle, he wondered if he ought to remain where he was so he could open the passage for the others when the time came to leave. But if he was wrong about the trigger, this would be his only chance to rejoin them, and for better or worse, staying with the group was the best way to protect them.

The floor shuddered to a stop and he was confronted with a different problem.

Which of the passages lining the outer wall was the correct one?

He closed his eyes, trying to remember what the room had looked like earlier, and where the elevated opening back to the surface had been located relative to the passage Fiona had indicated. His memory told him one thing, but his gut wasn’t so sure.

How long did he have? Fifteen seconds?

The floor started moving again, forcing him to decide. He sprinted across the floor, angling toward the passage he hoped was the correct one. If it wasn’t…well, it had to lead somewhere.

He reached the opening with plenty of time to spare, and dove through headfirst. The landing wasn’t as graceful as he might have hoped for, a little like stepping off a high-speed treadmill, but he scrambled back to his feet and took off running.

“Pierce!”

No answer.

He kept going, sprinting down the curving passage, nagged by the fear that he was moving further away from the others. Then he heard shouting, faint but urgent, and a different set of concerns took over.

The passage opened up, giving him a glimpse of what was happening far below. He couldn’t make out all the details, but he could see that the others were in trouble, stranded on some kind of enormous statue in the middle of a subterranean lake, under attack by… He couldn’t say what the things were, but there were a lot of them.

Pierce was swinging the backpack like a club, knocking the creatures back into the pool. Gallo was back to back with him, kicking at the squirming things and covering his blind side. Another figure lay between them, not moving at all.

Fiona!

Lazarus felt a fist close around his heart. He threw himself forward, leaping off the balcony and out into open space above the pool. He had no idea how deep the water was, or how many of the creatures might be lurking beneath the surface. Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Whatever happened, he would survive it, and then he would help the others.

But was it too late to help Fiona?

He hit the water feet first, throwing his arms out wide to put on the brakes. The pool’s depth, or lack thereof, wasn’t a problem. The bottom remained out of reach. The cold was a shock, but one he was ready for. Before his downward plunge was finished, he started pulling himself through the water, kicking furiously to reach the surface. After a few seconds, he began to feel the familiar burn of carbon dioxide building up in his lungs. He needed to breathe, but the surface remained out of reach.

A memory of drowning arose unbidden, blindsiding him. He doubled his efforts, frantic now to reach the surface before necessity forced him to take that lethal liquid breath. Fiona needed him. Pierce and Gallo needed him. If he drowned, his death would only be temporary, but theirs would be forever.

“No!” he raged, the shout turning into a storm of gas bubbles that swept across his face.

He was not going to die this way.

Not again.

He swam harder, reaching up and pulling the water down with frantic strokes. He kicked his legs back and forth, as fast as he could.

His right foot snagged on something. He kept kicking, trying to dislodge it, but the thing held on tight.

No, not now.

Another one of them landed on his thigh, sinking in claws that felt like thorns dipped in acid. Then they were all over him, immobilizing his arms and legs, tearing into his flesh, bearing him down once more into the depths.

EIGHT

The darkness is absolute, like the inside of a coffin buried under a hundred feet of earth. She cannot see the plants that no longer grow, or the nearby river, frozen into ice harder than diamonds. She cannot see anything.

The ground beneath her feet is impossibly dry, the moisture long since leached away by the bitter cold, and no matter how carefully she walks, every time her foot comes down, it makes a sound like bones breaking.

“Where has the light gone?”

She turns toward the voice. It is Raven. In the darkness, his bright plumage is as black as everything else, but she can hear the faint sound of his feet as he hops from foot to foot, unable to bear the touch of the frozen ground.

“My father took the sun and the moon from the sky,” she says, feeling both sadness and guilt at his selfishness. “So that he will not have to share their light with anyone.”

“There is enough light for all. Why would he want it all for himself?”

She does not know the answer.

“You are his daughter,” Raven says. “Surely, if you asked him, he would restore the light to the sky for you.”

“He will not do it for me.”

“Perhaps there is something we can give him in exchange for just one day of light.”

She knows it is a futile endeavor. “What could we give him that is better than the sun and the moon?”

“I know of a light that is even brighter and more beautiful.”

“Then you have no need of the lights in the sky.”

“This is a different kind of light,” Raven says. “A light that can melt a frozen heart.”

“My father’s longhouse is far from here. I cannot find it in the darkness.”

“I can help you find it, if you will let me ride upon your shoulder so that I do not have to walk on the cold earth.”

Although she does not believe anything can melt her father’s frozen heart, the possibility of finding her way out of the darkness is not something she can ignore. “I know that my father’s house is on the shore of a lake that feeds the river, but the water is frozen as hard as the ground. I cannot tell where the land ends and the river begins. And I cannot tell which way is upriver.”

Raven hops up onto her shoulder and whispers in her ear. “If you sing to the river, it will wake up and sing with you.”

Sing? Sing what?

She realizes it doesn’t matter, so she begins singing whatever comes into her mind, and as she does, the ice — all of it — melts, and the river joins in the song. She moves toward the sound, and soon there is a splash as she steps into the rushing water. She turns until she knows she is facing upstream. Now she knows which direction to go.

She hears another splash and realizes that Raven has leapt off her shoulder and into the water.

“Raven!”

She listens, but there is no reply. The only sound now is of the river, rushing all around her.

Raven is gone.

She wonders what to do now. She can find her way to her father’s house now, but without the light Raven promised, she will never be able to convince him to return the sun and the moon to the sky. At least in her father’s house, she may hope to catch some glimpse of the sun, and feel its warmth again.

The longhouse is not far away, but as she draws close to the sturdy structure of logs and earth, she hears her father’s voice. Shouting. Yet, there is something different about the sound. Curious, she goes nearer and sees radiant light shining from within.

“Higher!” shouts a new voice, child-like and full of innocence, and very, very familiar.

“I cannot throw it any higher, grandson,” booms her father.

Grandson? How can this be?

She is her father’s only child, and she herself has no husband. Her father guards her as jealously as he guards his other treasures.

She goes closer, and pushes past the heavy blanket that covers the door. Her father is there, and so is her son. They are playing, throwing the sun and moon about the room, as if the shining lights are nothing more than pine cones. As she looks at the boy, she remembers bringing him into the world, suckling him, nurturing him, and yet she also knows that none of it is true. It is a fiction, spun of spider silk and dreams, but it is a fiction her father believes.

Now she understands what Raven meant when he promised a light brighter than the sun. The light of a grandfather’s joy.

“Let’s go outside, grandfather” the boy cries, but it is not a boy, and not her son. It is Raven, wearing the skin of a beautiful human child. “I can throw it higher than you can. I’ll show you.”

Her father, blinded by the light of joy, does not see how Raven is tricking him. “Oh, you think so, little one? Here, take the sun. I will take the moon. We will throw them together, and you will see who can throw higher.”

The two of them — the angry old man who is, for the moment, not quite so angry, and the boy who is not a boy — rush past her, outside into the open. Without a moment’s hesitation, the boy draws back and throws the sun with all his might.

Or so he makes it seem. The golden light barely rises above the roof of the longhouse before falling back into the boy’s hands.

“Oh, ho!” cries the old man. “Impatient, are we? Now it’s my turn. Watch this.”

He bends his knees, reaching down as if to gather strength from the earth itself, and then hurls the moon up, up, up into the inky blackness.

Suddenly, with a rustling, Raven bursts out of his human skin, spreading his wings and lofting into the sky. One talon clutches the sun, the other grasps at the velvet darkness, tearing tiny holes in the firmament as he claws higher and higher, chasing the still rising moon.

The old man cries out in dismay, but whether he mourns the loss of his prize or the loss of his joy, she cannot say. His cry becomes a shout, then a peal of thunder, chasing after Raven. He howls again and again, beating the Earth in frustration, and the Earth shakes with such ferocity that the longhouse falls apart, but nothing he does can bring Raven back. And while he rages, the moon sails past the horizon and slips behind the firmament.

The sun, knowing that it is almost free, begins to burn brighter, too bright to look at. Raven cries out in agony as his feathers blacken, burnt by the sun’s touch, but he does not let go. His talons tear still more holes in the sky, but as the sun rises higher, its light pushes back the darkness, transforming night into day, restoring life, filling the world with light…

Fiona came to with a start, legs jerking, feet reaching for the ground that was no longer under her. She threw her hands out, as much to catch herself as to grab hold of this new reality in which she found herself.

There was something in her fist, a crumpled piece of shiny fabric. Where did that come from?

“Fi!” Gallo shouted. “Thank God.”

“Aunt Gus…?”

“Get up, Fi. We’re in trouble.”

She sat up, the memories flooding back in, but her recollection of the darkness, of Raven stealing back the sun and the moon, did not slip away as dreams usually did.

The giant trilobite-centipede creatures were everywhere now, swarming toward them. They were so close that she could see their black eyes, tipping long stalks that protruded from the segmented carapaces, and chattering mandibles.

“Did you see that?” Pierce pointed out across the water. “That was Erik!”

“Erik?” Fiona hadn’t seen anything. She looked around but there was no sign of him. “Where is he?”

“In the water.” Pierce swung the backpack again, knocking another of the attacking creatures out across the pool. He looked her in the eyes, entrusting her the same way she’d seen her father do with his teammates. “You’re my heavy hitter, Fi. You can help him.”

She scrambled to her feet and started kicking at the creatures. They were a lot more solid than she expected, like striking a bucket full of water, but her first kick launched one of the trilo-pedes into the air. The second one however, caught the sole of her hiking boot in its mandibles. She gave a yelp that was part frustration, part fear.

Pierce stepped in and brought the backpack down like a hammer, crushing the arthropod’s shell, releasing an explosion of rust-brown guts.

She shook her foot, but succeeded only in separating the pincer-like jaws — which were embedded in the rubber sole of her boot — from the crushed body. Focus, she told herself.

The golem’s hand rose, lifting them high above the surface of the pool, and it moved toward the spiraling walkway where they had first arrived. Even before it stopped moving, Fiona leapt onto the path and scrambled several feet until she was well clear of the water-line.

As soon as Gallo and Pierce were clear, she commanded the golem to move away, but as it did, half-a-dozen of the trilo-pedes dropped off the stone hand and began scurrying up the walkway toward them.

Fiona ignored the creatures and focused her intentions on the golem.

Find Erik.

The stone automaton plunged its head and shoulders under the water with a splash, sending out a wave that crashed against the wall below where Fiona and the others were standing, soaking them with spray.

A few seconds later, the golem emerged again, one of its massive fists curled around a motionless human form. The hand opened to deposit Lazarus at their feet, and Fiona saw that he was covered in trilo-pedes. Rivulets of diluted blood streamed down the walkway, as the squirming creatures continued tearing into Lazarus’s flesh.

Pierce started forward, probably intending to attack the menacing creatures with his bare hands, but Fiona beat him to it.

Prompted by another silent command, the golem’s hand detached at the wrist, splitting into five human-sized golems that landed on the walkway with a rapid series of earth-shaking thumps. They were rougher-looking than the giant; the large pieces of stone comprising them did not allow for fine details, but what they lacked in aesthetic appeal, they more than made up for in sheer power.

Two of them bent over Lazarus and began smashing trilo-pede carapaces between their bowling ball-sized fists. The other three began stomping the advancing creatures with reckless abandon, splattering the walkway with green-brown goo. In a matter of seconds, Lazarus was bug-free, and the area around them clear of the creatures.

Pierce and Gallo rushed over to the unmoving Lazarus and took hold of his arms, dragging him further up the walkway, even though the threat was held at bay. A moment later, the big man convulsed, breaking free of their grasp. He curled into a fetal ball and gave a great racking cough, spewing water from his mouth and nose, and then he howled as if he was being burned alive.

His agony was palpable, and for a fleeting instant Fiona felt like she might pass out again. Pierce and Gallo recoiled as well, but the moment passed. Lazarus mastered the primal fury-beast his resurrection had almost unleashed. He blinked several times, his head jerking as he took in his surroundings. His clothes were riddled with little gashes, each no more than an inch long, and through them, Fiona could see bright pink skin — new skin — growing back at an accelerated rate to replace the chunks torn away by the trilo-pedes. Beyond him, the golems continued stomping the creatures, each stone footfall sounding — and feeling — like a blow from a sledgehammer.

“I’m okay,” Lazarus rasped, his face still contorted as he endured the unimaginable pain of rapid healing. He rose to a kneeling position. “Looks like you guys didn’t need me after all.”

“We’re just glad you made it,” Gallo said, but despite her welcoming and relieved tone, her body language told a different story. She was afraid of him, afraid that he might lose control of the fury-beast and kill them all. Fiona knew better, but her attention was divided between controlling the golems and grappling with the mystery of her strange…dream? Vision?

She squeezed her fists tighter and realized she was still holding on to the bunched up piece of shiny fabric.

“Can you walk?” Pierce said.

Lazarus nodded. “If I have to, I can run.”

“I don’t think we’ll need to do that, as long as Fi can keep our retreat covered.”

“What are those things?” Gallo asked.

“Some kind of pre-historic crawdad,” Pierce said. “There could be an entire isolated eco-system down here. Fortunately, we’ve got what we came for, so I think we can forego further exploration.”

Fiona realized he was staring at the thing in her hand. “This?”

She held it up, opening her hand, and as she did, the fabric expanded with a pop. Instead of an amorphous crumpled mass, a perfect sphere, the size of a softball, now rested on her palm.

She remembered it now, remembered trying to pick it up and how unmovable it had been.

And then I passed out. That can’t be a coincidence.

It was feather-light now, like holding on to a soap bubble. She applied gentle pressure with her fingertips, distorting the precise symmetry, but it popped back into shape as soon as she relented.

“Okay, that’s a neat trick,” Pierce said, bending down to take a closer look at the orb. “Looks like it’s woven from some kind of memory metal wire. Definitely not from the Sintashta period.”

He straightened and glanced over his shoulder at the waterline. Trilo-pedes were still emerging from the pool, crawling up onto the walkway, only to be obliterated by Fiona’s golems.

“But that’s a discussion for another time,” he went on. “Fi, you brought us this far.”

“She needs a minute,” Gallo said, moving closer to Fiona. “You passed out back there. Are you okay? Did something happen to your insulin pump?”

While she could bend earth and rocks to her will, Fiona’s own body was not always as cooperative. Diagnosed with Type 1 insulin-dependent diabetes, she managed her blood sugar with a sophisticated computer-controlled insulin pump, tucked in an inside pocket at her hip, but in stressful situations — being trapped underground and menaced by giant bugs, for example — her body chemistry got too far out of whack, and she crashed.

She knew what that felt like, and this wasn’t it.

“The pump’s fine,” she said. “I’m fine. How long was I out?”

“Just a few seconds.” Gallo’s forehead creased with concern. “Are you sure you’re okay? Was it that thing?” She pointed to the orb.

“Maybe. I’m not sure. I had a…vision. Maybe it was just a dream. My subconscious trying to tell me something.”

“What did you see?” George asked with sincere interest.

“It was something from an old story my grandmother taught me: Raven Steals the Light.” She saw the others exchange a concerned glance. The vision…dream…memory…whatever, was still vivid in her memory, but the relevance of the underlying message was not so clear.

If you sing to the river…

“The river,” she blurted. “I think this pool is connected to an underground river. If we can find it, we can follow it to the surface.”

The same intuitive certainty that had brought her down to the lowest reaches of the ancient city was now telling her that she had everything she needed to get them back out.

If you sing to the river, it will wake up and sing with you.

But she did not need the river to wake up. She needed it to sleep again.

She didn’t even attempt trying to explain it. She wasn’t sure there were even words for it. Instead, she put both hands on the sphere, lightly, so as not to crush it, and she began to sing, chanting the same tribal song she had sung in the vision of Raven.

And just as in the vision, the water listened.

NINE

Carter felt only a little guilty about the deception that had secured her a seat aboard an Italian military transport bound for Geneva. Although she wasn’t a medical doctor, she had done international relief work in Africa. She felt a certain kinship with the men and women who were willing to set aside their lives and rush headlong into the jaws of a crisis to help the helpless.

In her own way, she was doing the same, which was why she was able to hold her head up high as she filed off the plane with all the other volunteers. Then she slipped away from the queue to pursue her own mission of mercy. If she was right about the earthquakes having an other-than-natural cause, then her actions might save thousands of lives.

Although there were ongoing widespread power outages across Europe, the television news networks were already back up and running, chronicling the disaster for the few who possessed the means to watch. Carter did not have access to a television, but as she got off the plane and turned on her satellite-enabled smartphone, she received a flurry of messages from Dourado, most of which contained links to various news agencies. She skimmed the articles and briefs, and was pleased to learn that most of the quakes had caused little more than cosmetic damage, with minimal loss of life.

There were a few exceptions, though. An 8.1 magnitude temblor off the coast of Portugal had done extensive damage to Lisbon and the surrounding areas. The subsequent 30-foot tsunami had done even more damage all along the coasts of Portugal, Spain, and Morocco. Though the number of confirmed dead was still low relative to the population in those areas, estimated casualties were in the tens of thousands. A 7.5 quake had been reported in the Hindu Kush mountains, affecting parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and while few details had emerged from that remote region, similar events throughout history suggested the death toll would be in the thousands. What made the situation even more tragic was the fact that the minor damage and disruptions in cities across Europe would further delay relief efforts.

Carter read the articles quickly, gulping them down so that the scope of the tragedy wouldn’t overwhelm her. The most bitter news was contained in the last message, just three short words:

George Pierce carried a satellite phone just like hers, capable of sending and receiving from almost anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, the phone relied on line-of-sight. It didn’t work underground, and underground was where Pierce and his team had gone before the quakes had begun. That Pierce still hadn’t checked in, two hours later, could only mean one thing.

They were still underground.

Not thinking the worst was impossible. Lazarus and the others might already be dead, or worse: buried alive and dying, unable to reach the surface. And there wasn’t a thing Carter could do to help them.

Her response, which wasn’t a response at all, was even briefer:

She put the phone away and headed outside. She was traveling light, as was her custom. No luggage, not even a carry-on. It was not her intention to spend the night, but if she had to, she could buy whatever she needed.

A skycap directed her to a waiting taxi, and the dutiful driver opened the rear door for her. As she slid inside, her attention was drawn to an LED touch screen — about the same size as her tablet computer — mounted to the back of the driver’s seat. On the screen were two rows of virtual buttons, each one marked with a language choice. Assuming that it was some kind of onboard entertainment system — and most likely not a complementary amenity — she ignored it, waiting for the driver to take his place and inquire about her destination.

A moment later, a disembodied female voice began speaking. The first utterance was in French, a language that she spoke, though not fluently. The same voice carried on in German — at least Carter thought it was German — and then in Italian, another language she was picking up. Regardless of the language, the statement was the same.

“Please select your language from the menu,” the voice said in English.

With a sigh, she tapped the button marked ‘English.’

“Welcome,” the voice said. “Please state your destination.”

Carter raised an eyebrow. “Welcome to the twenty-first century,” she murmured.

“I’m not sure I understood,” the voice replied. The screen went blank for a moment, then a virtual keyboard appeared. “Please say or enter your destination.”

Carter cleared her throat and enunciated her answer. “Tomorrowland.”

“Searching.” The screen refreshed again, displaying several choices: An electronic music festival in Belgium, a revival cinema showing the 2015 Disney film of the same name, and a nightclub called No Tomorrow.

“Do you see your destination here?”

Carter shook her head, then she remembered she was talking to a machine. “No.”

“Please state your destination.”

Carter kicked herself for not having done her homework, and wondered if she would have better luck just talking to the driver. “I’m trying to find Marcus Fallon. Or Ishiro Tanaka.”

“Searching.” The screen blinked again and the list changed. There were a few personal listings, though none of them contained the exact combination of first and last names. But one item on the list stood out to her. “Space Tomorrow,” she said. “That’s the one.”

The screen changed to show a full business listing for Space Tomorrow, which included location, phone number, and the name of the founder, Marcus Fallon. “Is this where you want to go?”

“Yes,” Carter said, starting to feel a little exasperated by the process.

The fare for the trip appeared on the screen along with a menu of buttons. “Please choose your payment option.”

As Carter made her selection and swiped her credit card, she recalled an article she had read about something called shadow work, which was the name economists used to describe the shift to self-service and automated systems. Shadow work was everywhere, from self-service checkout lines at grocery stores to automated ordering systems at restaurants. It was widely preached that automated customer service systems were preferred by consumers, especially the younger, hipper, Millennial crowd, who enjoyed the freedom of taking charge. In fact, it was the businesses that benefited, because instead of paying employees to interact with customers, the customer became an unpaid laborer — grocery clerk, waiter, travel agent — without any meaningful savings in the exchange.

Like it or not, this was the future.

At least they hadn’t replaced the taxi driver yet.

As the cab pulled away from the curb, she realized she was wrong about that, too. The man sitting in the driver’s seat was looking at his smartphone — one hand holding it, the other swiping right — and he was paying no attention to the road ahead. But the wheel turned and the car accelerated, pulling into the flow of traffic.

The car was automated, too.

Carter’s panic was immediate but short-lived. The computer brain controlling the car was probably more attentive than the human driver on his best day, and with 360 degrees of constant observation through integrated video and radar surveillance systems, it was certainly more aware than any human driver ever could be. The human operator, though he probably didn’t realize it, was only there to facilitate the transition to a completely automated system. In five years, nobody would think twice about sliding into the back seat of a fully automated taxi.

She settled back and tried to enjoy the ride, but everywhere she looked, she saw reminders of the recent upheaval — downed trees and power lines, cracked concrete, boarded-up windows, and broken glass. There had been several small quakes in the area, all occurring simultaneously, multiplying the destructive intensity of the seismic waves. Fortunately, no lives had been lost.

Fallon’s corporate complex was situated a few miles to the north of the airport, on the shores of Lake Geneva. The ride was short and uneventful. As the taxi pulled to a stop at the gated entrance to the walled compound, the LED screen flashed to life with the message:

The voice of the computer echoed the message, and then asked if she wanted the taxi to wait for her.

“No, thank you,” she said, feeling a little awkward speaking with the machine, and ignoring the real flesh-and-blood human sitting in the front seat. The driver — or rather the driver’s-seat filler — did come to life long enough to let her out. Then without a word, he got back in, and the car drove off.

At least he didn’t act like he expected a tip.

The gate was unmanned — what a surprise — so she put herself in full view of the security camera and waited to see what would happen. She expected to hear another disembodied voice from an intercom, but instead the gate rolled back. As she stepped through, an electric golf cart rolled up and stopped beside her. Unlike the taxi, this vehicle did not have even a token human operator.

“Welcome to Tomorrowland, Dr. Carter.”

The male voice — smoother than the automated system in the taxi, but no less artificial — did not surprise her. The fact that she had been recognized did. “I…ah…thought this place was called ‘Space Tomorrow,’” she said, trying to hide her dismay.

“Space Tomorrow is the name of Mr. Fallon’s company. Tomorrowland is our unofficial nickname for this facility.”

Our? Maybe the voice did belong to a real person.

“Please, get in. I’ll take you to Mr. Fallon.”

“Actually, I’m here to see…” She stopped herself. “Were you expecting me?”

“Not exactly, but I will let Mr. Fallon explain.”

She hesitated a moment, looking around at the manicured green lawn and sculpted topiary. In the distance, she could see buildings, but there was not a living soul anywhere to be seen. She settled onto the cart’s cushioned bench seat. “I guess I’ll talk to Mr. Fallon, then.”

The electric vehicle executed a smooth, precise turn and headed down the paved drive, while behind her, the gate rolled back into place, sealing her in.

Over the low hum of the electric motor, she heard the noise of activity. The high-pitched whine of saws tearing through wood, the grinding of concrete mixers, the rapid-fire report of nail guns… She hoped they were just nail guns. Tomorrowland had not come through the earthquakes unscathed, but the repair crews were already busy fixing the damage. But as the first of the buildings came into view, she realized that one of her conclusions was mistaken. There were no repair crews, at least not human ones. The work was being done by robots.

They were utilitarian, more upsized WALL-E than C-3P0, though even that was an imperfect comparison. Their bulldozer-sized tracked bodies sprouted numerous appendages, articulated with hoses and telescoping chrome hydraulic actuators, some tipped with pincer-like clamps, and others with the power tools she had heard from afar. The robots moved with abrupt efficiency, performing a complex but beautiful synchronized ballet. Damaged sections of wall were cut down and removed, and just as quickly replaced with studs and sheets of plywood, cut to size and fastened in place in a seamless and unending progression. There were no mistakes, no ‘measure twice, cut once’ redundancies of effort, and no rest breaks. Carter recalled that Dourado had described Tomorrowland as a facility for testing robotic systems for space stations, but the reality was far more impressive than her wildest sci-fi fueled expectations.

The cart pulled up to one of the buildings and stopped. Carter noted a conspicuous lack of signage to differentiate the buildings, which seemed odd. The disembodied voice spoke again. “Mr. Fallon is in the Operations Center. A guide will show you the way.”

“Thank you,” she said, feeling the same strangeness about the interaction as she had earlier. It occurred to her that she had not experienced a meaningful interaction with an actual human being since leaving the airport.

Her guide turned out to be another robot, albeit much simpler in design than the builder-bots. As she stepped through the door, something that resembled a scaled-down Segway scooter with a round yellow disk where the handlebars should have been, rolled toward her. “Hello, Dr. Carter,” The voice was female and pleasant, and Carter detected a faint accent. Some kind of personality subroutine, no doubt. “Please, follow me.”

The guide-bot spun around, facing down the carpeted hallway, but did not move until Carter started walking. Once she did, it managed to stay just a couple of steps ahead of her. As they went along, Carter noted the plain décor. Evidently, there was no room in the budget for interior design or creature comforts. Stranger still, none of the doors had doorknobs. This mystery was explained when the guide turned toward one of the doors and it swung out into the hallway without any direct contact.

Automatic, Carter mused. Naturally.

The door led into a large open room — it reminded her of a budget hotel conference room — and she was relieved to see two actual living people seated in folding plastic chairs around a folding plastic table, which was lined with laptop computers and other electronic devices. On the back wall of the room hung three large plasma screens, each one depicting rows of mathematical formulae. The men at the table turned to look at her, and one of them — he had pale, freckled skin and wiry red hair, and he looked far too young to have any sort of authority — began walking toward her, a tablet computer still gripped in one hand.

Carter tried for a winning smile. “Mr. Fallon, I presume?”

“Who are you?” he said, with more than a trace of suspicion.

She wondered at his ignorance. Hadn’t her identity already been well-established? She decided to roll with it. “I’m Dr. Felice Carter.”

The guide-bot spoke up. “You selected Dr. Carter for Proteus Team, Mr. Fallon.”

This explanation surprised Carter, but seemed to resolve the confusion for Fallon. “Ah, I see. My apologies, Dr. Carter. You’ve come at a rather bad time for me.”

“I…ah, actually, I didn’t…” She stopped and forced a smile. “I’m sorry, but what is Proteus Team? And how do you even know who I am?”

Fallon glanced back at the table for a moment as if trying to decide whether she was worth his time. “From time to time, I need to bring in freelancers to consult on some of my projects, so to save time, I pre-screen potential candidates and assign them to project teams. If you were selected for Proteus Team, then your field must be biology, correct?” He looked down at his tablet. “Display Carter.”

“Micro and genetics,” she replied. “So you just drafted me onto this Proteus Team?” Just like the Herculean Society and their recruitment codes.

Fallon continued looking at the tablet as he spoke. “As I said, it’s a prescreening measure to save time. There are twenty-three teams, each with at least a hundred candidates. Rather than issuing ident cards and credentials on a case-by-case basis, we streamlined the process by entering the likenesses into the facial recognition database. In the event that your expertise was called for, a proper invitation would have been made, along with suitable compensation for your time.”

He looked up and met her eyes again. “I’m afraid the protocols I put in place to welcome you didn’t anticipate the possibility that you might drop in of your own volition. I’m sorry I can’t give you a proper welcome. Proteus is part of our terraforming initiative, and we’re still in the conceptual phase with that. I would love to talk to you about the possibility of introducing genetically modified extremophiles into the Venutian environment, but as I said, this is kind of a bad time. Again, I apologize for wasting your time. I’ll have some information sent to you, and maybe we can see about reimbursing you for your time and expenses.”

“Actually, Mr. Fallon, I’m here on an unrelated matter. I’m looking for Dr. Ishiro Tanaka.”

Fallon was nonplussed, but Carter saw the other man react. She recognized the Japanese man from the photograph that accompanied his CV. He was clean-shaven with a modest business-like haircut, but ten years older than Fallon. Without waiting for Fallon’s reply, she started toward the table. “Dr. Tanaka, I just wanted to ask you a few questions.”

Fallon hastened to intercept her. “Dr. Carter, you can’t just barge in here and start interrogating people.”

She ignored him and continued to focus on Tanaka. “I understand that you’re an expert on microwave heating of plasma in the ionosphere. I was hoping to get your professional opinion on whether these earthquakes could be manmade, specifically the result of something like the HAARP array.”

She expected him to scoff, dismissing the very notion as baseless conspiracy theory, not worth the trouble of a detailed debunking.

But Tanaka did not scoff. Instead, he swallowed nervously.

He wasn’t the only one.

Fallon stepped in front of her. “Dr. Carter, I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“You know something,” she persisted. “Dr. Tanaka, were the earthquakes man-made? Did someone use HAARP or something like it to trigger the earthquakes?”

Fallon’s forehead creased in thought. He looked at Tanaka for a moment, then back at Carter. “Perhaps you can be of some help to us.”

“She’s a biologist,” Tanaka said. Despite his obvious ethnicity, there was no hint of an accent in his speech. “What would she know about this?”

Fallon ignored the comment. “Dr. Carter, to answer your question, HAARP had nothing to do with what happened today, but you are correct about one thing. The earthquakes were man-made.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I thought that was obvious. I made them.”

TEN

A silence hung over the group as they made their way out of the ice tunnel into a natural cavern system. Pierce couldn’t tell if his companions had been left speechless by the enormity of what Fiona had accomplished, or if, after everything else they had witnessed, they were taking this latest miracle in stride. He decided it was probably both, a not inappropriate oscillation between two opposing reactions that set up an interference pattern to cancel out everything else.

Miracle.

As a scientist, he was uncomfortable with the word. It felt like a cop-out. Every phenomenon had an explanation consistent with the Laws of Physics. Period. Admittedly, sometimes the explanation was beyond the comprehension of even the best theoretical minds, or as science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke had asserted, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Falling back on words like ‘miracle’ or ‘magic’ was just plain lazy.

Then again, he was an archaeologist, not a physicist or an engineer. He didn’t need to understand how Fiona had — using the Mother Tongue, or that weird ball of memory metal, or some combination of the two — turned the pool in the subterranean chamber into a skating-rink. At the same time, she had opened a tunnel through the ice that spiraled even deeper beneath the surface. It was enough for him to believe that an explanation did exist.

The strangest part was that it wasn’t even that cold. The ice was freezing to the touch, but the surrounding air was tolerable. It was as if the heat energy had been stolen away from the liquid water through some kind of endothermic reaction, rather than a more conventional exchange of heat with the surrounding environment.

Instant freezing by means unknown. Not a miracle, not magic, just a technology none of them could explain. Pierce might have said the same about his smartphone.

Bottom line, they were moving again, hopefully in the right direction.

The ice tunnel brought them to an outflow pipe — like a culvert deep beneath the surface of the pool — where the water drained out of the ancient city and joined an underground river. The passage rose, like the trap assembly in a flush toilet, then dropped in a frozen waterfall that splashed down the limestone wall. That was where the ice ended. Below them, the river was a glistening black void, a good twenty feet across, flowing through a deep canyon-like groove that cut through the uneven floor of the cavern.

Fiona offered no explanation for it, but said, “We should go upriver.”

“That will take us to the surface?” Pierce asked.

Fiona nodded.

“You saw that in your vision?” Gallo asked.

“Sort of. I think the vision was just my brain’s way of making sense of it all.”

“I’d still like to hear more about it,” Gallo said. “You mentioned the Raven?”

Fiona shrugged. “Just Raven…no ‘the.’ He’s a trickster figure in the mythology of the Pacific Northwest tribes, but his tricks usually worked out for good in the end.”

“And you saw Raven in your vision?”

“Sort of. It’s like I was inside the story. How Raven stole the sun and moon. My grandmother taught it to me. Well, a version of it. Every tribe tells it a little differently.”

“Not an uncommon thing in oral traditions,” Pierce observed.

“Tell us,” Gallo pressed.

“We should keep moving,” Lazarus said in a low, grave voice. Despite the fact that his clothes were now bloody tatters hanging from his large frame, he seemed to have made a full recovery from the wounds inflicted by the trilo-pede swarm, but Pierce knew how demanding, physically and mentally, the regeneration process was.

As they made their way into the cavern, following the course of the underground river, Fiona related what she had seen in her dream of Raven.

“And is that the way your grandmother taught it to you?” Gallo asked when she reached the end of the story.

“There were a few differences. In the original version, Raven waits until Girl stops to take a drink of water from the river, and changes himself into a tiny little fish, which she swallows without realizing it. Later on, she gives birth to the baby boy — Raven in a new disguise. I guess the idea of swallowing a fish and getting pregnant always seemed kind of silly to me. Maybe that’s why the dream was different.”

“Interesting variation on immaculate conception,” Gallo remarked. “Were there any other differences?”

“In the story, Raven first meets the girl outside her father’s house. She isn’t lost like I was in the vision. She doesn’t have to follow the river, and she doesn’t have to thaw it out with her song. I figured that part was my subconscious telling me how to get out of here.”

Pierce nodded. “You blacked out when you touched that thing.” He pointed at the orb Fiona still held in her hand. “Maybe it was telling you what to do, but your subconscious used the story to put it into a context you could understand.”

“Why that particular story?” Gallo asked. “Have you been thinking about it recently?”

Fiona shook her head.

“Do you think it means something?” Pierce asked.

Gallo shrugged. “Hard to say. I’m a historian, not a psychologist. But it’s an interesting story.”

“Seems like your basic turning of the year myth,” George said. “The sun vanishes as the solstice approaches. A deity — in this case the raven, a winter bird — transforms into a human to bring it back.”

“Well that’s one way to interpret it,” Gallo countered. “But if, as you suggest, that orb is trying to tell us something, maybe we need to open our minds to other possibilities.”

Pierce gave a noncommittal grunt. “Are you getting anything from it now, Fi?”

“I don’t think so. But it feels like we’re still going the right way.”

Thousands of years of water flowing through the surrounding karst, eroding the limestone as it followed the path of least resistance, had created a cave system that was easy to navigate. Lazarus, however, seemed to grow anxious as he brought up the rear.

Pierce dropped back. “Should we be worried?” he whispered.

“Always.” Lazarus gave him a tight smile. “Those things back there—”

“The trilo-pedes?” Fiona asked, looking back at them.

“Private conversation,” Pierce said with a tight smile. He forgot how well-trained her ears were at detecting language, even when the words were whispered. And he had to admit, her name for the enormous arthropods was appropriate.

“There were a lot of them in that pool,” Lazarus went on. “And it looked to me like they were drawn to us. Or to that thing Fiona is carrying.”

“You think there might be more of them here, in the cave?” Pierce found himself wishing that Fiona had brought along one or two of her golems. Before venturing into the ice tunnel, Fiona had uttered a short command, ‘Tesioh fesh met,’ one of the very few phrases in the Mother Tongue she had mastered, to disassemble the golems, just to avoid confusion if the buried city was ever discovered again. With the threat from the trilo-pedes neutralized by the ice, there was little reason to keep the golems, and besides, she could always make more if the need arose.

“I think there are probably a lot more of them here,” Lazarus said. “This is their primary habitat, not that pool. They’ll have the advantage here, even over Fiona’s golems. I’ll feel a lot better when we’re back under the sun. Until then, all we can do is keep moving.”

“George,” Gallo called out. “Look at this.”

Pierce jogged forward to join her and found her examining a wall adorned with streaks and splotches of black and red. It didn’t take too much imagination to see animal shapes, and human figures.

“Looks like we’re not the first people to discover this cave,” she said.

“That’s a good sign, right?” Fiona said. “It means there’s a way out.”

“No,” Pierce countered. “It just means there was a way out twenty thousand years ago. A lot could have changed since then.”

Before Pierce could amend his pessimistic assessment, there was a splash behind them, followed by a scrabbling sound. Pierce turned his headlamp toward the sound, just as something emerged from the river channel, heading right for them.

It was a trilo-pede, but bigger, with an armored thorax as broad as a queen-sized mattress, tapering into another six-feet of segmented tail.

It also wasn’t alone.

“Just once,” Pierce grumbled, “it would be nice to have a few minutes to look around.”

ELEVEN

I made them.

Carter felt a mild surge of panic at Fallon’s revelation. He would not have made the admission if he had any intention of allowing her to walk out the front door.

She wasn’t afraid of him, though. Not by a long shot. Her panic arose from the possibility of what might happen if the man was stupid enough to threaten her.

Yet, there had been no threat, not even an implicit one. Fallon did not come across as a mad scientist or a maniacal Bond villain, crowing about having the power of life and death in his hands. Rather, he seemed almost embarrassed.

Not ‘I just caused a global catastrophe that killed thousands of people’ embarrassed, Carter thought. More like ‘Whoopsie, I just backed over your cat’ embarrassed.

“We haven’t established a connection yet,” Tanaka snapped. He was afraid of what she might do with the knowledge. “This was purely an optical test. The earthquakes couldn’t have been caused by anything we did.”

“Come on, Ishiro,” Fallon countered. “Coincidences like that just don’t happen.” He looked at Carter again. “Let’s get you up to speed.”

“She’s a biologist—”

“She’s a scientist, led here, and to you, by impressive deductions. Let’s read her in. Maybe she’ll give us a different slant on this.”

Carter’s anxiety ebbed a few degrees. Whatever else these men were, they weren’t madmen bent on destroying the world.

Fallon returned to his seat at the head of the table and began entering commands into a laptop. One of the wall screens began changing. Without looking away from what he was doing, Fallon said, “I’m going to assume that you’re familiar with what it is we’re trying to do here.”

Carter advanced and took a seat at the table. As she sat down, she took out her phone and laid it on her thigh. “By here, you mean Tomorrowland…or is it Space Tomorrow?”

Fallon gave a mirthless laugh. “I wanted to call the company Tomorrowland, but Disney sicced their lawyers on me.”

“Lawyers.” Carter smiled. She also tapped the icon on her phone screen to open a voice-chat application that would stream every word uttered in the room to Dourado in Rome. “As I understand it, you’re trying to develop robotic systems to advance space exploration.”

“Exploration. Colonization. We were supposed to have moon bases and space stations by the dawn of the twenty-first century. What happened? A loss of vision, that’s what. Well, that and the fact that space is exceptionally hostile to organic life. Science fiction did us all a huge disservice by making it look easy.”

He gave a dismissive snort, then seemed to realize that he was straying from the point. “Colonizing space…building space stations and livable habitats is possible. You probably saw my robots when you came in. To borrow a phrase from an old TV show, ‘We have the technology.’ With just the robots I have here at Tomorrowland, I could build a self-sufficient lunar base in six months, using raw materials from the moon itself. But the real goal…the Holy Grail…is terraforming. Making the other planets in the solar system habitable.” He paused a beat. “You’re familiar, I assume, with the concept of the Goldilocks Zone?”

Carter nodded. “It’s the hypothesis that life can only exist in a very specific range of temperatures. Earth is just the right distance from the sun. Venus is too close, and therefore, too hot. Mars is too far away, too cold for liquid water to exist on the surface.”

“Actually, Mars lies within the habitable zone, and Venus is marginal, but yes that’s the gist of it. Temperature is the variable. If we could modulate the amount of solar energy reaching those planets — send more sunlight to Mars or the moons of Jupiter, offer Venus some shade — then terraforming moves from science fiction pipe dream to plausible reality. We would also be able to shut down global warming here, and make the Earth a little more habitable again.”

Carter felt a glimmer of understanding. “Manipulating sunlight. Smoke and mirrors on a planetary scale. That’s what you were trying to do.”

“Not trying,” Fallon said, with more than a little pride. “We did it. We stopped the sun for ninety seconds.”

“How?”

“Like you said. Smoke and mirrors. More mirrors than smoke, actually.”

She nodded at Tanaka. “You said it was an optical test. You used microwaves to heat the ionosphere and create a plasma lens, right?”

“The ionosphere? That’s nothing.” Fallon returned his attention to the computer for a moment, entering a final command. “Do you know what a Dyson Swarm is?”

“Is it anything like a Dyson Sphere?”

Fallon nodded. “The Dyson Swarm is a variation on Freeman Dyson’s theoretical proposition that a sufficiently advanced species would, out of necessity, need to utilize all the available energy from its home star. One way to do this is the Dyson Sphere, a shell built around the star, collecting all the radiant energy. As engineering projects go, that would be pretty ambitious. You would need several planets worth of raw materials to create something like that. The Dyson Swarm proposes using free orbiting solar collector satellites rather than a solid structure. Obviously, that would greatly reduce the amount of energy that could be collected, but the yield would be tremendous. Enough energy to colonize the entire solar system. Maybe even fuel interstellar near-light-speed spacecraft. Last year, astronomers observed unusual fluctuations in the light coming from a star 1,400 light years away. The most plausible explanation for these dimming periods is a Dyson Swarm, built by an intelligent alien civilization.”

“I’ve heard about that. I’ve also heard that they probably aren’t alien structures at all, but comet fragments.”

Fallon smiled. “They aren’t comet fragments. And they aren’t alien megastructures, either. When Dyson first proposed his idea in 1960, he couldn’t conceive of any other way to harness a star’s energy, but today we know that light can be focused and refracted with strong magnetic fields. With the technology that we have today, it’s possible to utilize a considerable portion of the sun’s energy without building a physical shell or a swarm of collection satellites. All we need, is a few of those.”

He pointed at the wall screen, which now displayed an image of what appeared to be the Earth, viewed from space. Just visible in the faint blue band where the Earth’s atmosphere meets the vacuum of space, was a jagged black shape.

“Its unofficial name is ‘the Black Knight Satellite.’ It’s an electromagnetic anomaly orbiting the Earth, first detected in 1899 by Nikola Tesla, while he was conducting radio experiments. But he had no idea what it was. It wasn’t until the 1950s, when the idea of sending man-made satellites into orbit became a reality that anyone considered the possibility that the signals Tesla picked up might be coming from an object already in orbit. Over the next two decades, there were several sightings from reputable sources — U.S. Air Force pilots, naval tracking stations, astronauts. The government moved quickly to cover them up, dismissing interest in the phenomenon as UFO hysteria. In 1973, a Scottish astronomer published his hypothesis that the object was an alien space probe that had been in orbit for thousands of years. Somewhere along the line, the name ‘Black Knight’ stuck.”

“Aliens?” Carter made no effort to hide her smile.

Fallon seemed not to have heard her. “NASA says it’s a thermal blanket from the International Space Station.”

Carter took another look at the object on the screen. It did sort of look like a crumpled-up blanket floating in zero-G. “You’re sure it’s not?”

“Could a blanket do this?”

As if on cue, the misshapen object on the screen began to expand and swell, like a bag of popcorn in a microwave oven. In a matter of seconds, it transformed into a perfectly symmetrical sphere, glowing brighter and brighter until the screen was filled with radiance.

Fallon turned away, looked at Carter. “That’s our mirror. The footage you’re seeing is from a satellite I sent up six months ago to keep an eye on it. From a discreet distance, of course. This is from three hours ago. The test.”

Three hours ago, Carter thought. When the earthquakes hit.

A full minute passed before the brilliance receded to a pinpoint, and as the afterglow faded, Carter saw that the object had returned to its original irregular shape. She turned back to Fallon. “What is it?”

“It’s a meta-material. Carbon nanotubes spiraling around an alloy core of copper, with tungsten and molybdenum. At least we think so.”

“You think?”

“The experimental results are consistent with that identification,” Fallon said. “Our hypothesis is that the satellite was originally part of a larger structure that almost collided with the Earth. The main body fell into a near-polar orbit, while smaller pieces fell to Earth as meteorites. Fragments of the same material have been recovered at various meteor impact sites around the planet, which is how we were able to confirm the age of the satellite. It’s 13,000 years old.

“The U.S. government took an interest in it after World War II. We know that because civilians investigating the Roswell crash in 1947 reported finding a piece of metal that was as pliable as fabric, but always returned to its original shape.”

“Roswell? Aliens again?”

Fallon shook his head. “What crashed at Roswell was an experimental military aircraft utilizing a piece of the meta-material recovered from one of the Black Knight meteorites. An early attempt at a stealth plane. The so-called ‘alien bodies’ recovered from the site were ordinary human test pilots who experienced a physical alteration after exposure to the meta-material. It’s safe to handle under everyday conditions, but when stimulated it can have…unpredictable results.”

Carter wanted to hear more about unpredictable results but Fallon didn’t give her a chance to ask.

“Roswell was a rare failure. Almost every significant technological breakthrough in the last fifty years came out of the effort to reverse engineer that meta-material. Just the effort, mind you. No one has been able to duplicate it.”

“Is it alien?”

“The Black Knight is extraterrestrial in origin, as was the meta-material used in the Roswell aircraft. By extraterrestrial, I mean that it didn’t originate on Earth. That doesn’t mean that it’s the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence, though.”

Carter got the distinct impression Fallon believed that to be the case, even if he wasn’t willing to go on record with it. “How did you activate it?”

“I managed to acquire the Roswell meta-material fragment — a case of being in the right place at the right time with the right offer. By incorporating it into our antenna array, we were able to generate a focused beam of microwave radiation at the precise frequency of the satellite, which produced a sympathetic electromagnetic field around it. EM fields can refract or magnify light just as effectively as a glass lens. More effectively, since the photons don’t have to interact with a solid medium. The sun produces a staggering amount of energy, of which only an infinitesimal fraction reaches Earth. The trick is producing and maintaining a field big enough to manipulate that fraction.”

Or turn it into a weapon, Carter thought, imagining Fallon as a little boy, using a magnifying glass that looked like the Black Knight satellite to incinerate an anthill. Even if he wasn’t malicious, Fallon was reckless. “And it never occurred to you that something like that might be dangerous?”

Tanaka spoke up, his tone defensive. “There’s not a shred of proof linking these earthquakes to our test.”

“I’m not here looking to assign blame. I just want to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Ever. Off the record, is it possible that there’s a connection between your experiment and the earthquakes?”

Tanaka glowered but said nothing. Fallon spread his hands. “I’m afraid it’s more than just possible. It happened.

“Earthquakes are caused by the sudden release of energy stored in the Earth’s crust, usually from the movement of tectonic plates.” He pressed his fingertips together to simulate the oppositional forces. “The energy builds up over long periods of time — thousands of years — and then it’s released in a sudden sharp movement that sends out seismic waves. Something we did today must have caused all that stored energy, in faults all over the world, to be released simultaneously.” He allowed his fingers to slip past each other with an audible snap.

“Could disrupting the Earth’s magnetic field do it?” Carter asked. “A lot of people were worried that HAARP might trigger a pole reversal.”

“Magnetic pole reversals have occurred many times in the past. On average, every million years or so. There’s no evidence that those pole shifts were accompanied by seismic disturbances, though, and in any case, there’s no evidence of severe electromagnetic disturbance. No, I think the culprit is gravity, specifically, tidal forces.

“You probably know about ocean tides. As the Earth rotates, the sun and moon exert a constant gravitational pull on the oceans. But the tides also affect the Earth itself, not just the crust, but the whole globe, creating a measurable bulge that moves as the Earth turns. We don’t notice it because it’s happening on a global scale. Over the last few billion years, the planet has reached a sort of equilibrium — seismically speaking — with these forces, much the same way a spinning top will straighten up after an initial wobble. But imagine what would happen if that equilibrium were to be disturbed by some external force. It would be like bumping the top.”

Carter nodded. “So the Black Knight didn’t just bend sunlight. It bent the sun’s gravity waves, too?”

“That’s my working hypothesis.”

“But it’s over now, right? The top is spinning normally again?”

“I see no reason why it shouldn’t. The sun’s tidal force is less than half that of the moon. I know it may not seem like it, but the bump was slight. These earthquakes would eventually have happened anyway. Some of them might have been much worse, so in a way, this is a good thing. I don’t think we’ll see the same level of seismic activity moving forward.”

It took Carter a moment to digest what Fallon was saying. “Moving forward? Are you serious?”

“Progress only moves one way. And if the data support this hypothesis, we might be a step closer to cracking the problem of artificial gravity.”

Carter narrowed her gaze at him. “What would have happened if the ‘bump’ had been a little bit harder? What would have happened if you had kept it turned on for two minutes? Or five? Or an hour?”

Fallon looked away, unable to endure her scrutiny. “That’s not going to happen.”

“You need to shut this down. Put the genie back in the bottle.” The exhortation was as much for her own benefit — and hopefully for Dourado’s eavesdropping ears — as for Fallon’s. His cooperation was unlikely at best, and even if he agreed to suspend his research, that was no guarantee that he or someone else wouldn’t pick it up again at some future point — uncorking the bottle and letting the genie out once more. “You said you needed the Roswell fragment of meta-material to activate the Black Knight. That’s the only way to do it, right?”

“Technically any piece of it would work, but that’s the only fragment I’m aware of.”

“So we get rid of that and problem solved.”

Fallon bristled. “I’m not going to just throw it away.”

“That’s exactly what you’re going to do.” Carter took a deep breath, squaring her shoulders like a lioness preparing to pounce. While her unique…condition…was not something she could exercise with surgical precision, the mere fact of its existence, of the fury she could unleash, allowed her to project strength, menace even, and that was a force almost as powerful. “Right now, the governments of every civilized nation on Earth are asking themselves if someone has invented an earthquake weapon. I figured it out. They will, too. They probably already have. They’ll be coming for it and for you, and unlike me, they won’t ask nicely.”

When Fallon did not reply, she pressed her attack. “This is how you save the world, Fallon. Bury it deep before someone uses it to start the next arms race. Because if you don’t, you’ll be responsible for whatever happens next. Today was an accident. Tomorrow will be mass murder.”

Fallon sagged a little under the verbal assault, which did not escape Tanaka’s notice. “You can’t be considering this.”

Fallon was silent for a few seconds. When he spoke, his manner was subdued. Defeated. “If Einstein had known, at the beginning, what his research would lead to…” He leaned back in his chair, leaving the thought unfinished. “Maybe we did move a little too fast with this.”

Carter forced herself to relax. It wasn’t the decisive victory she might have hoped for, but it was a huge step in the right direction. Now I just need to figure out how to get that meta-material away from him.

Tanaka, who had been glowering at his employer, looked down at his computer screen, his face registering consternation, then alarm. “This isn’t right.”

“What is it, Ishiro?” Fallon asked.

Tanaka tapped a few keys and the picture on the wall screen updated with a flicker. It still showed the Black Knight with the curve of the Earth behind it, but from a different angle, which altered the satellite’s appearance. A moment later, Carter realized it was more than just a change of perspective. The Black Knight was expanding again.

The transformation was more gradual than before, like the slow movement of a clock’s hour hand, where before it had been as quick as the sweep-second hand.

“What’s happening, Ishiro?”

“I don’t know. It may be responding to Earth’s magnetic field or background radiation.”

Fallon’s anxiety was palpable, as was Tanaka’s helplessness. Carter shared both emotions. “What will happen when it finishes changing? Another bump?”

“It depends on the timing,” Tanaka said. “If full deployment happens on the nightside, probably nothing, provided it cycles down again. If it deploys on the dayside or stays that way when its orbit brings it back around…” He shrugged. “A really big bump.”

“You turned it on,” she said. “Can’t you turn it off again?”

Fallon passed the question to his scientist. “Can we?”

“Another pulse perhaps.” Tanaka seemed to be thinking aloud. “An attenuating frequency.”

“Do it.”

Tanaka nodded and started tapping keys on his computer, but after a moment he slammed his fists down on the table. “I’m locked out.”

“Locked out?” Fallon and Carter asked the question simultaneously.

“We’re being hacked. Someone is overriding our system.” Tanaka looked up. “That must be why the satellite went active.”

Fallon bent over another of the computers and for several seconds, the only sound in the room was the faint clicking of plastic keys. The tension multiplied with each passing second until Carter couldn’t take it anymore. “If we pull the meta-material — the Roswell fragment — out of the antenna array, would that shut it down?”

Fallon looked up at her, then at Tanaka. The Japanese scientist shook his head. “The satellite is out of our control. Removing the meta-material might make things worse.”

“Or better,” Fallon countered, jumping to his feet. “We’ll try it.”

“Marcus!”

But Fallon was already heading for the door. “Have a cart waiting for me out front,” he said, as he passed the waiting guide robot. “We’re going to the array.”

The robot slid forward, putting itself between him and the exit.

Fallon barely managed to stop short of crashing into it. “What are you doing? Get out of the way.”

“Your presence is not authorized,” the electronic voice said. “Please remain where you are. Security has been notified.”

TWELVE

A third mattress-sized trilo-pede squirmed up out of the river channel to join the other two. Their enormous shells bristled with spiny horn-like extensions, but it was the clacking mandibles that projected real menace. The four humans who had blundered into their subterranean domain were good for just one thing: food.

Lazarus started toward them, pausing long enough to shout back over his shoulder. “Get out of here. I’ll try to slow them down.”

Pierce turned away, arms wide in a herding gesture, though Fiona and Gallo needed no coaxing. They ran to the extent that the topography would allow it, but in the ambient glow from their headlamps, Pierce saw another of the creatures rising out of the river channel ahead of them. But something else came out of the river with it, a man-sized golem formed of smooth, fist-sized rocks and mud. It leapt onto the back of the nearest trilo-pede, slamming its underbelly down against the cavern floor.

Way to go, Fi! Pierce thought, intending to shout the words, but before he could follow through, the trilo-pede began thrashing, flinging pieces of the golem away like drops of water until nothing was left. Instead, Pierce said, “Bigger!”

“I don’t have anything to work with,” Fiona complained.

The ill-fated golem had bought them a few seconds, just enough time to slip past the creature. Pierce looked back, trying to gauge its speed, and saw Lazarus come up behind the monster and scramble onto its back.

The creature tried to throw him off, but Lazarus was not as easy to dislodge as a rough, hastily constructed golem. He reached down and seized one of the protruding spikes in each hand, but holding on wasn’t his intention. He flexed his legs, and then, with a howl of primal rage, he pulled. There was a sickening, sucking sound as the segments tore loose from the creature’s body in a spray of dark fluid, trailing long ropes of tissue.

The trilo-pede’s thrashing intensified, and with his handhold no longer connected to the thing’s body, Lazarus was hurled clear. He landed on his side, but somehow managed to turn the crash into a roll. Then he was back on his feet in an instant, brandishing a piece of trilo-pede exoskeleton the size of a car’s bumper. As the wounded creature struck at him, he thrust the end of the shell between the chattering mandibles, and with his full weight behind it, he rammed it deep into the trilo-pede’s body.

“George!”

Pierce turned his gaze forward again and saw the reason for Gallo’s shout. To his left, the river channel widened and flattened out, disappearing as the river spilled out onto the cavern floor, forming one enormous puddle that stretched from wall to wall. Water dripped and trickled from the walls, raining down from the stalactite-studded ceiling fifty feet overhead. The walls were riddled with gaps and holes where the flow had eroded the limestone, but none were big enough to accommodate a person. There were no other passages. This was the source of the underground river.

They had run out of cavern.

He looked back again, and saw Lazarus running with two of the giant trilo-pedes close on his heels.

“Fi, please tell me you’ve been holding back.”

The young woman did not answer, but her eyes closed and her lips began moving. Pierce wasn’t sure what she was attempting, or if she even knew herself.

Fiona was adept at creating golems, but the shortage-of-raw-materials problem had not gone away. The cavern was mostly solid. The river had long ago carried away or dissolved most of the rocks that might have been suitable for that purpose. Golems — the term had come from Jewish folklore — were an attempt to reproduce the Biblical miracle of Adam’s creation by breathing life into a body made of clay or loose soil. The emet incantation could animate a human or animal simulacrum, and to some extent, define its shape, but it couldn’t transform solid rock into something more pliable or cause a fully formed rock giant to step out of the limestone walls.

Which was not to say that could not be done. The Mother Tongue was the language of creation, the very words God had used to bring the universe into existence. In the past, Fiona had created Golems out of solid stone. A mountainside, in fact. But she had not memorized the phrases, and by the end of her ordeal, she had forgotten much of the Mother Tongue that had been revealed to her. She was relearning what she’d lost, but she was not there yet. Pierce had also seen Fiona change solid stone into something as ephemeral as smoke. Surely there was something she could do, something she could say.

“What about the sphere?” Gallo shouted, pointing to the ball of memory metal Fiona was still carrying. “Is there a way to use it?”

Fiona didn’t acknowledge the question, but a sudden chill rising up from the flooded floor of the cavern suggested that she was already working that angle. With a faint, almost musical crackling sound, the water underfoot crystallized. The ice crept up the walls like a time-lapse video of a spring thaw running backward. The walls froze. The steady dripping ceased as icicles formed on the stalactites.

Lazarus, the only one of them still moving, lost his footing. His legs shot out from beneath him and he landed flat on his back, sliding across the ice-slicked surface, out of control. The trilo-pedes pursuing him hesitated at the ice margin, probing it with their steak knife-sized leg tips, then they started forward again.

“Fi, I don’t think—”

A noise, like a series of explosions deep within the surrounding karst, cut Pierce off. The cracks and holes in the walls began spreading, opening wider like yawning mouths, as the water deep inside the rock froze and expanded. Huge chunks of limestone broke loose, spilling onto the floor all around them. The upheaval shattered the scrim of ice on the floor, and for several seconds, it was all Pierce could do to stay on his feet.

The tumult was too much for the trilo-pedes. The squirming giants twisted around and vanished back into the darkness. That was little consolation to their former prey, for at that moment the ceiling started crumbling as well.

Pierce threw up a hand in a hopeless attempt to shield himself as icicles and chunks of stone, some bigger than he was, started breaking loose and crashing down all around him.

“Get to cover,” he shouted, reaching for Fiona, intending to drag her out of harm’s way, but the cave-in was happening all around them. There was no outrunning it and no shelter.

Then something else broke through the canopy overhead.

Daylight.

We almost made it, Pierce thought, as a sliver of light grew and the ceiling above him started to fall.

But instead of dropping straight down and crushing Pierce and Fiona to oblivion, the rock shifted sideways, as if rebounding off an invisible force field. In the corner of his eye, Pierce saw more stones moving in defiance of gravity, coming together like building blocks. They formed a squat, blockish man-shaped golem. It spread its arms out, catching the last few pieces of falling rubble, but as it did, the friction of dry stone grinding together began to overwhelm the tenuous connections holding the construct together. Fiona threw a hand out, delaying the creation’s collapse long enough for it to take one lurching step toward the nearest wall, where it slumped in a mini-avalanche.

Lazarus was the first to grasp what Fiona had just done. He pointed to the newly created rock pile. “There’s our exit.”

They scrambled up the loose and uneven stone staircase, climbing the last few feet to reach the edge of the hole. The late afternoon sky was visible through it. Pierce helped boost Fiona and Gallo, then he took his turn, and Lazarus brought up the rear.

As Pierce’s head cleared the opening, the first thing he saw was a jumble of brightly colored fabric strewn out on the ground before them. The subterranean journey had taken them in a circle around the site of old Arkaim, and had brought them up near the banks of a small creek at the edge of the campground — or what remained of it anyway. Between the earthquake and the sinkhole collapse Fiona had triggered by freezing the groundwater, only a few of the tents were still standing. There was no sign of the campers and New Age tourists who had occupied them.

Pierce took a minute to get his bearings, then turned in the direction of the nearby parking lot. Despite everything that had happened, the expedition to Arkaim had been a success. The memory-metal sphere Fiona had recovered was the sort of artifact the Cerberus Group had been created to keep under wraps, even if they had no idea where it had come from or what its purpose was.

Time to boogie.

He was just about to reach for his phone to call Dourado and let her know that they were all still alive when he heard someone shouting. The words were in Russian, but sounded officious, which wasn’t surprising since the man shouting at them from the other side of the hole was wearing a dark military-style uniform. He was also holding a rifle, which was pointed at them.

Pierce had stashed the babelfish hardware in the backpack. Trying to take it out probably would have been the wrong thing to do, but he had a pretty good idea what the man was saying. Something along the lines of ‘You’re under arrest,’ or ‘Hands up,’ or maybe even ‘Go ahead, punk. Make my day.’

Crap.

As he skirted along the edge of the hole, the man unclipped a walkie-talkie from his belt and uttered a few harsh-sounding words into it.

Probably calling for reinforcements, Pierce thought. Double crap.

Dourado had warned him that the archaeologist in charge of the site — what was his name? Z-something — had reported Pierce to the cultural authorities. Pierce didn’t know if the man heading their direction was a policeman sent to deal with them or a soldier securing the site in the aftermath of the earthquake, but either way, it would be almost impossible to slip away with the memory-metal sphere.

“Fi, you got any more tricks up your sleeve?”

The Russian shouted again, probably ordering him to stop talking. Pierce waggled his hands in the air in a show of surrender. The man reached the edge of the sinkhole, glanced down into it just for a second before bringing his gaze back to Pierce. Then he stopped and looked down again, eyes wide in disbelief. He breathed a Russian curse as he brought the barrel of his rifle down and took aim at whatever it was he saw below.

Even though he knew it was coming, Pierce jumped a little when the first shot was fired. Lazarus however, seized the initiative. “Now. Run for it.”

Fiona and Gallo took off running, but Pierce hesitated, half-expecting the Russian to start shooting at them. The man never looked away from his target in the sinkhole, though.

That must be some golem, Pierce thought, glancing down.

It wasn’t a golem.

“Go,” Lazarus urged. “Get to the car.”

Pierce jolted into motion just as the Russian’s smoking rifle went silent, its ammunition supply exhausted. Pierce caught a glimpse of the man trying to replace the spent magazine, then the man simply wasn’t there anymore. Something had seized hold of him and dragged him down into the pit.

“Go!” Lazarus urged again.

A trilo-pede body came out of the sinkhole, then another and another, like the tentacles of a giant octopus, probing the unfamiliar daylight world — testing it, tasting it.

Pierce ran.

Fiona and Gallo had already reached the rented vehicle, and Pierce was nearly there as well when he spied two more uniformed men running across the parking area on an intercept course. Lazarus poured on a burst of speed and managed to reach the driver’s side door before the Russians could close half the distance.

Not that they were paying attention to the fleeing humans anymore. Both men were staring in astonishment at the creatures undulating across the grass, heading in their direction. The Russians opened fire, but the bullets didn’t seem to have any effect on the advancing creatures.

Pierce climbed into the passenger seat and Lazarus started the engine. The tires threw up clods of turf as the vehicle shot forward. Pierce looked over his shoulder, curious to see what would happen next, but Lazarus turned out of the parking lot and he lost sight of the battle. “You think the Russians will be able to handle those things?”

Lazarus shrugged. “They’re not so hard to kill.”

Pierce grinned. “Easy for you to say.”

“The longer the Russians spend dealing with them, the better our chances of making it across the border and into Kazakhstan, so maybe it’s better for us if they do have to work for it a little.”

Pierce knew Lazarus was right, but he still felt a little guilty for unleashing the monsters on Arkaim.

He allowed himself a long overdue sigh of relief. The world was safe again. Mission finally accomplished.

He dug out his phone to call Dourado and tell her the good news.

THIRTEEN

Fallon stared at the robot with an expression somewhere between amusement and irritation, like a long-suffering parent dealing with a defiant toddler. “Run voice and facial recognition again. Verify authorization, and then do as instructed.”

“Your presence is not authorized,” the robot said again. It scooted six inches closer to Fallon, tilting its sensor disk toward him, exuding menace. “Please remain where you are. Security has been notified.”

Fallon glanced over at Carter and grinned weakly. “It happens.”

Carter saw nothing funny about the situation. She was about to tell him as much when she felt her phone vibrate. She glanced down at it and saw Dourado’s face displayed above the words ‘incoming call.’ The voice-chat app was still running. Dourado wanted to keep their conversation discreet. Carter tapped the screen to receive the call and turned away, lowering her voice to a discrete stage whisper. “I’m here.”

“I heard everything,” Dourado said. “This is very bad.”

“You’re telling me.”

“Whoever is hacking Fallon’s computer network is also controlling that robot.”

“I kind of figured that. Somebody doesn’t want us shutting the antenna array down.” The full significance of that sank in. The earthquakes and the solar event had been an accident, an unforeseen consequence of Fallon’s recklessness, but what was happening now was intentional. “Cintia, someone’s using the Black Knight as a weapon.”

“Then they’re playing Russian Roulette,” Dourado replied. “That thing could destroy the whole planet if it gets out of control. Who would take that chance?”

“I don’t know. We’ll figure it out once we shut it down. Any ideas on how to get past this robot? Does it have an off switch?”

“Probably not where you’ll be able to get to it,” Dourado said. “But it sounds like a pretty simple machine. You should be able to outmaneuver it.”

Outmaneuver? Carter turned around and took another look at the robot. Dourado was right about its design being simple. Two large wheels mounted on a rectangular base, which probably contained both its CPU and a self-balancing mechanism to keep it from tipping over. “Okay, hang on a sec. I’ve got an idea.”

She shoved the phone into her pocket and started toward the door. The robot shifted to meet her approach. “Your presence is not authorized.”

When she did not stop, it started rolling toward her, projecting menace as its calm artificial voice finished the canned warning. “Please remain where you are…”

Carter side-stepped and took a quick step forward. The robot shifted to block her, reacting faster than any human, but the one thing its sensors and programming could not do was anticipate what she would do next. She cut back in the other direction, and then sprang forward, launching herself onto the robot’s base. As soon as her feet touched down on the molded plastic housing, she wrapped her arms around the upraised sensor disk and threw her weight sideways. The robot tilted up on one wheel and toppled over. As it passed the point of no return, Carter hopped clear.

The robot’s wheels spun helplessly, which caused the mast with the sensor disk to whip around in a circle, forcing Carter and Fallon to scramble out of the way, but after a second or two, some internal safety switch was tripped and it went still.

Fallon was livid. “What are you doing? That’s not a toy.”

“No, it isn’t,” Carter said. “It was a problem. I dealt with it. Maybe this hasn’t sunk in yet, but you aren’t in control of this place any more. Now, can you get us to the antenna array?”

“Fine,” he growled through clenched teeth. He took a step toward the door then stopped again.

“Well?” Carter asked.

“It’s not opening.”

“Oh, for the love of…” She reached out to open the door, but there was nothing to grab ahold of. “Who thinks doors without doorknobs are a good idea? Are we trapped in here?”

Fallon’s mouth worked but he had no answer.

Carter studied the door, looking for some vulnerability in the electrically-powered computer-controlled system. There were no hinges, which meant the door opened outward into the hall, and that gave her an idea.

“We need to drag that table over here.” Without waiting for Fallon or Tanaka to join her, she crossed the room and grabbed one end of the table. It was a lightweight folding rectangle, made of plastic or some similar composite material, durable enough for everyday use, but nowhere near as heavy or solid as a wood or metal table would have been.

It’ll have to do.

She tipped it over on its side. The edge banged against the carpeted floor, the noise causing both Fallon and Tanaka to wince. Neither of them had made a move to help her.

She folded the legs up and maneuvered the upended table around the toppled robot, lining it up perpendicular to the door, leaving a gap of a couple feet. “Never mind,” she muttered. “I’ll do it.”

She lowered her shoulder to the back edge of the table and then, like a sprinter bursting forward at the sound of the starter’s pistol, rammed it into the door. The lightweight table was a far from ideal battering ram, flexing in the middle with the impact, but enough of her momentum was focused into the leading edge to burst the internal latch free of the bolt hole. The powerful electric hinges kept the door from flying open and started trying to close it again, but the blow created a narrow opening between the door and the frame. Carter shoved the table forward again, forcing it through the gap to ensure that the door didn’t close again, then used it like a pry-bar to force the opening wider.

“Little help?”

Fallon shook off his stupor and moved up to assist her. “Would you please stop breaking my things?”

“News flash,” she grunted, as she squirmed half her body through the gap. “Your things are already broken.”

She stuck her head out into the hallway and saw two more of the upright wheeled robots scooting toward her. They were identical to the one that had guided her in — and then turned on them — except that instead of a bright yellow, their sensor disks were glowing fire engine red. A stentorian male voice, amplified as if by a bullhorn, barked out, “Halt. You are being detained.”

“I guess security really has been notified,” Carter muttered. With a heave, she scraped through, spilling out onto the carpeted floor.

“Halt,” the robot voice repeated. “Do not move, or you will be forcibly subdued.”

Despite the warning, Carter started to rise, but then she spotted bright red pinpoints of light shining from something mounted under the robots’ sensor disks. The lights reminded her of lasers — not the kind in science fiction movies, but the kind used in supermarket scanners and CD players.

And close-range gun sights.

She glanced down, saw two star-bright red dots on her chest, and threw herself flat again.

A loud pop, like a balloon bursting, signaled the discharge of some kind of compressed air weapon. Something flashed above her and embedded itself in the wooden door behind her with a faint thunk. She looked up and saw two long, twisted wires extending from the robot to the door. The rapid clicking sound of a pulsed electrical discharge confirmed her suspicions that the robots were armed with Tasers.

She took little comfort in the knowledge that the machines were only trying to stun and not kill her. If she couldn’t get Fallon to the antenna array, and soon, the distinction would cease to matter. But she was encouraged by one thing. Unlike bullets, Taser electrodes weren’t designed to penetrate flesh. Or anything else.

She rolled over, reasoning that a moving target was harder to hit than a stationary one, and grabbed ahold of the folding table that still protruded from the doorway. A single sharp pull brought it the rest of the way out into the hall and in the same motion whipped it around so it was between her and the robots. There was another pop and she felt a faint thump reverberate through the tabletop, as a second Taser shot hit, with no more effect than the first.

Carter peeked over the top of her shield. The security robots were only about ten feet away. Their advance had stalled but they were still blocking her path to the exit. She looked back at the door and saw Fallon wriggling through.

About damn time, she thought. “Do these robocops of yours have anything more powerful than Tasers?”

Fallon stared at her for a moment as if flummoxed by the question, but then shook his head. “No. I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“Of course not.”

Tanaka came through after Fallon, which both surprised and pleased Carter, as she had expected the Japanese scientist to stay behind. If removing the meta-material from the array didn’t shut the Black Knight down, his expertise would be critical to figuring out what to do next.

When both men were crouched down beside her, she raised the table a few inches off the ground and said, “Follow me.”

Without further explanation, she started forward, as fast as her crouched stance would allow. The robots barked another warning, but they stood their ground. Carter didn’t slow. Instead, she raised the shield a little more, just high enough to clear the twelve-inch diameter wheels on which the machines rolled. As the tabletop collided with the robots’ sensor disks, the impact tipped the robots over backward. Carter let the table fall flat, pinning the machines to the ground beneath it, and then clambered over and sprinted down the hallway toward the exit.

Another automatic door — this one made of half-inch-thick glass — blocked the exit, and as expected, it remained closed as she approached. She pushed on it and tried shouldering it open, but it didn’t budge. Desperate, she looked around for something — a chair or some other solid object — to smash through the glass, but Fallon had designed his building with robots in mind. There was no reception desk or visitor lobby, no creature comforts at all. Just the door and the hallway leading into the building.

A strident blast of sound ripped through the relative quiet, causing her to wince in real pain. She whirled around, wondering if this was some new sonic weapon being employed against them, and she saw a grinning Fallon with one hand on a small red fire alarm button mounted to the wall.

“Try it now!” he shouted.

Carter pushed on the glass, and the door swung open. Some kind of safety override feature, she thought. That would have been nice to know about a few minutes ago.

She headed through the door and waited for Fallon and Tanaka to catch up. There was no electric cart waiting to bear them to the antenna array. “How far away is it?”

“Not far,” Fallon said, taking the lead. “Half a mile.”

It would take seven or eight minutes to walk half a mile — four or five to run it — and that was assuming they didn’t run into any more security robots. How long did they have before the Black Knight finished deploying and started either scorching the Earth with prolonged solar radiation or ripping it apart with tidal forces?

Not far? It might as well have been in another country, but what choice was there?

Fallon took off at a jog, running deeper into the complex of buildings. Carter followed, looking for a large parabolic satellite dish, or something that resembled the pictures she had seen of the HAARP array in Alaska — which in pictures looked like two dozen old-fashioned TV antennas lined up in military formation — but Fallon’s destination turned out to be something else: a one-story windowless parking garage.

“We’re driving?” Carter asked, as they headed through the doorless opening leading into the structure.

Fallon glanced back. “You didn’t think we were going to walk?”

He stopped just inside and stared out at the arrayed vehicles. Carter was surprised to see how many of the parking spaces were filled. There were more than a dozen different vehicles. She wouldn’t have guessed there were so many human employees at Tomorrowland. Fallon was evidently a generous employer, too. There were no minivans or soccer-mobiles in the lot, just luxury sedans and sports cars.

“Which one’s yours?” she asked.

“They’re all mine. Just trying to decide which one.” He threw her a defensive look. “What? I like cars.”

She shook her head and muttered. “First world problems.”

Fallon angled toward the closest vehicle, a blue Tesla Model 3. He tried the door handle but it didn’t budge. “What the hell?”

“Don’t you have the key?”

“There are no keys. It’s biometric.” He held his fingertips against the handle for a few seconds before trying again, but the result was the same. “It’s not recognizing me.”

“There’s a lot of that going around. Somebody doesn’t want you shutting that antenna down.” Carter scanned the other cars. “You got anything low-tech in here?”

Her eyes roamed the line of sleek modern vehicles and settled on a classic 1960’s, silver sports car with elegant spoked wheels. It looked like something from an old James Bond movie. “What about that one?”

“Perfect,” Fallon flashed a mischievous grin, and ran to the vehicle, which was unlocked. Fallon went to the right side, which confused Carter for a moment—does he want me to drive? — until she realized that the car was configured for right-side driving. Without complaint or protest, she squeezed into the cramped back seat, allowing Tanaka to have the front passenger seat, while Fallon started the vehicle.

Driving the silver car seemed to energize Fallon. He slammed the gear-shift lever into reverse and the car jolted violently as he let out the clutch, backing out of the parking space with a screech of rubber. He shifted again, and the car shot forward, whining in protest as he maxed first gear before reaching the garage door.

Despite the cramped seating arrangement and Fallon’s over-excited driving, Carter was relieved to finally be moving in the right direction, and even more relieved when, after less than a minute of tearing down the paved road, Fallon brought the sport’s car to a skidding stop in front of a small cinder block structure at the end of the drive. Just visible behind it was an elaborate structure of wires and metal rods that looked a little like an electrical transformer hub.

“See?” Fallon said, throwing the door open. “Not far.”

“This is dangerous, Marcus,” Tanaka said, breaking his self-imposed silence. He waved his tablet, and Carter saw that it was still displaying the real time feed from the Space Tomorrow satellite trailing the Black Knight. Evidently, the hacker had only locked them out of control function, allowing Fallon to keep his eyes in the sky. “We don’t know what will happen if we interrupt the signal.”

Fallon waved a dismissive hand. “It’s not going to make things worse. Until we can get control of the transmitter back, this is the right thing to do.”

Carter withheld comment and followed the two men at a distance. Tanaka’s wariness concerned her—What if he’s right? — but she had no expertise to inform her opinion, and in any case, she was more inclined to agree with Fallon’s approach.

Fallon opened a utilitarian metal door — a regular door with a door knob and no fancy electronic gizmos — and went inside, with Tanaka close on his heels. Carter remained outside, but she could feel heat radiating from the interior, which was dominated by an enormous machine enclosed in a non-descript metal housing from which sprouted a pair of thick insulated cables. A loud electrical hum emanated from the device. Fallon opened a small access door on its side, revealing a nest of wires and processors, and then reached inside.

The loud hum stopped.

He reached in a little further and rooted around for almost a full minute before emerging. Something that looked like a scorched, crumpled piece of tightly woven window screen, about the size of a washcloth, protruded from his closed fist.

“That’s it?” Carter asked.

It looked too ordinary to be so dangerous.

Fallon cocked his head sideways and smirked. “Doesn’t look like much, but it’s probably the rarest material in the world.” He turned to Tanaka. “Any change?”

Tanaka looked down at the tablet for several seconds, then shook his head. “As I feared, it’s not responding. We should restore the transmitter. Maybe whoever did this knows how to shut it down.”

“No.” Fallon was emphatic. “I’m not going to take that chance. The transmitter stays offline until we can get control of our systems again. Speaking of which…” He nodded to the waiting car. “It’s time to take back Tomorrow—”

The declaration faltered and died as Fallon’s stare fixed on something in the distance beyond. Carter followed his gaze and saw why he had been rendered speechless.

One of the bulldozer-sized construction robots Carter had passed on the way in rolled into view from behind one of the main buildings. Another one came after it, and then several more. Six of them altogether, moved single-file, like floats in a Christmas parade. When the last of them was clear, the formation broke apart and reshuffled until the machines were lined up side-by-side, like a cavalry charge, sweeping toward them.

FOURTEEN

Carter grabbed the end of the memory metal fragment and tore it from Fallon’s grasp. It felt strange in her hand, cool to the touch, with a texture like a handful of little springs. Fearing that it might ooze out of her grip, she shoved it into her pocket and darted for the right side of the car. She slid behind the steering wheel, clutched, and turned the key. As the engine roared to life, Fallon stuck his head in through the passenger side door.

“What are you doing?”

“Leaving,” she said, putting the car in gear.

Fallon’s jaw worked but she cut him off before he could articulate his protest. “Get in. If you want to fix this, we have to go now.”

“Ishiro, let’s go,” Fallon said without looking away, and then as an afterthought, he muttered, “Shotgun.”

As they climbed in, Carter checked on the advancing robot wave’s progress. They were still about a hundred yards away, and while not built for speed, they were moving faster than a human could run. Two of them blocked the road, while pairs on either side rolled across the landscaped greenspace, crushing topiary shrubs and throwing up huge clods of dirt with their metal treads. Getting around them was going to require more than fancy footwork and a plastic table.

As soon as the two men were inside, Carter let out the clutch. The car shot forward, and she hauled the steering wheel around, requiring almost a full-body effort since the car didn’t have power steering. She carved a tight U-turn that brought them back around onto the road, facing the construction-bots. “Is there another way out of here?”

“That’s the only road.”

Carter surveyed the off-road possibilities. The pavement was bordered by hedges, which the second and fifth robots were obliterating with complete indifference. Beyond the hedgerow, there was a grassy expanse about twenty yards wide. It ended at Lake Geneva’s shore on one side and a stand of trees on the other. But most of the open space was dominated by the robots at the ends of the formation. “Do those things have any weaknesses?”

Fallon blinked as if he found the question insulting, but then shrugged. “They’re built for heavy labor…construction. They aren’t war machines.”

“Could have fooled me.” She considered the statement a moment longer. “What does that mean exactly?”

“It means they don’t see us as an enemy. You can’t just splice in a line of code and turn a construction machine into the Terminator.”

“So you’re saying they’re here to… fix us?” Try as she might, Carter couldn’t see how the distinction mattered.

“I’m saying they don’t think strategically.” Then he added, “And they can’t turn worth a damn.”

“Why didn’t you say that in the first place?” Carter accelerated again. She pushed the gas pedal, let out the clutch, and the car shot forward like a robot-seeking missile.

“What the hell are you doing?” Fallon cried out, flailing his arms as if trying to stop himself from falling.

When the wall of robots was just fifty feet away, she slammed on the brakes and cranked the steering wheel, sliding into another U-turn, now only a few feet ahead of the advancing machines. In the rear-view mirror, she could see hydraulic manipulator arms unfolding above the tracked chassis like the legs of some gigantic praying mantis reaching out to crush them in its pincers.

Carter floored the gas pedal again, and the car shot forward as one manipulator arm, tipped with an over-sized circular saw, came down. There was a shower of sparks as the blade struck the pavement, mere inches from the rear bumper. She cut the steering wheel to the right and the robot made another grab for her, but as it did, it veered into the path of the neighboring machine just as it also tried to attack.

The air behind them was filled with an ear-splitting shriek and the crunch of metal being torn apart, as the two machines tried to occupy the same space. Chunks of debris began raining down all around, pelting the back of the sports car, even as Carter cut back the other direction.

The two robots were hopelessly entangled, and after only a few seconds of struggling, they gave up the fight. As the advancing line moved past the wreckage, the others closed ranks, making sure that the road was blocked. And they kept coming.

Carter made a wide sweeping turn, leaving the road surface, crashing through the hedges on the roadside, and carving twin furrows in the lawn like a teenager on a joyride. The tires slipped on the soft ground, spraying out loose dirt as they dug down, looking for something solid to grab onto. The car fishtailed and slid sideways as she fought to maintain control.

When the arc of the turn brought them back around, she straightened the steering wheel and gave the car a little more gas, headed toward the machine moving along on the right side of the pavement. Another human, or an artificial-intelligence capable of strategic thinking, might have realized what she was planning to do and taken steps to head her off, shifting the entire formation to block her. But the construction robots stayed on course, as if daring her to a game of chicken.

When she was still a good fifty feet away, she steered to the side, angling for the wide open gap between the machines and the trees. The robot responded, but its slow, jerky turn gave Carter all the time she needed to zip past.

She then angled the car back toward the pavement. Behind them, the machines were reversing course, but couldn’t keep up with the sleek sports car once she got the tires back on the asphalt.

As they shot down the road, heading back toward the complex of buildings and away from both the array and the wayward construction robots, Carter kept accelerating, winding out each of the gears in the five-speed transmission. As she shifted into fourth, the speedometer was already tipping sixty — miles per hour, not kilometers. Evidently, this ride predated Europe’s embrace of the metric system.

“You know how to drive a stick,” Fallon said. “That’s rare nowadays.”

She shot him an annoyed look. “Are you hitting on me?”

She almost added, My boyfriend won’t like that, but just thinking it reminded her that Erik and the others were all still missing.

“Of course not,” Fallon replied, though the mischievous gleam in his eyes suggested otherwise. “Just noticing.”

Her ability to drive a manual transmission had more to do with necessity than any particular love of driving. She had spent a good part of the last few years in remote parts of Africa, where older vehicles were more common and more reliable — or at least easier to maintain — than the newer, more technologically advanced models. Driving wasn’t a luxury activity for her, it was a necessary thing, and often a matter of survival. Sometimes her own, or sometimes survival for a village full of people a hundred miles out in the bush, desperate for a cure to some tropical disease. That had meant being able to drive whatever was available in any conditions.

Still, Fallon’s car was a pretty sweet ride. She felt kind of bad about what she was going to have to do next.

The turn-off to the garage flashed by. Ahead in the distance, she could just make out the entrance to the compound. “I don’t suppose there’s any way the gate is going to open for us.”

“Probably not,” Fallon admitted.

“Good things these old cars don’t have airbags.”

Fallon nodded but then realized what she was saying. “Oh, you’re not going to…” Leaving the sentence unfinished, he reached down to the upholstered arm rest on the center console, and flipped it up to reveal several small switches.

“Bumper extensions,” he said as he flipped a couple of them, then straightened in his seat, gripping the dashboard with both hands in anticipation of the impending crash.

Carter didn’t know what he was talking about, and she was too focused on the approaching gate to care. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed movement. A driverless electric cart, possibly the same one that had delivered her to Fallon’s building, was rolling down a side-road on an intercept course.

She pushed the car harder, winding out fourth gear, and shot past the intersection before the cart could cut her off. There was a slight jolt as the robotic vehicle grazed the sports car’s rear end, but they were going too fast for it to make any difference.

Carter kept watch for more kamikaze carts as the gate drew closer, but the hacker was out of tricks. She gripped the wheel and kept the pedal to the floor, closing the remaining distance so quickly that it came as a surprise when the front bumper slammed into the metal gate.

The barrier flipped up and spun around in mid-air, registering a glancing blow on the car’s roof. Carter felt the impact shudder through the vehicle’s frame and heard the engine whine in protest for a moment, but that was it. She downshifted as they reached the main highway. Traffic was light, and she barely touched the brakes as they skidded through the turn, crossing to the far lane that would take them back to Geneva. Then she accelerated again.

Beside her, Fallon let out his breath in a long relieved sigh. “Not bad. I’m glad we’re on the same side. Though you are kind of hard on my toys.”

“Your toys tried to kill us.” She glanced over at him, wondering if they really were on the same side. “We need to get somewhere safe and figure out our next move.”

“Our next move is taking back Tomorrowland. That hacker may have caught me with my pants down, but he’s played his hand. It’s my turn now, and payback’s a bitch.”

Despite the bravado, Carter knew he was right about their priorities. Removing the memory metal from the transmitter had not shut the Black Knight satellite down, so regaining control of the array was imperative. “I have a friend who might be able to help with that.”

She was about to dig out her phone to call Dourado, but a flash of color in the rear view mirror stopped her. A familiar-looking blue car had just turned onto the highway behind them. “Is that your Tesla?”

Fallon craned his head around. “Son of a bitch,” he snarled.

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ That must be our hacker.”

Fallon shook his head miserably. “No. It’s autonomous.”

Two more cars, one a cream-colored sedan, the other a sleek black coupe emerged from the Tomorrowland gate to join the pursuit. She couldn’t discern the make or model, but there was little question that they were also from Fallon’s stable. “You turned your cars into robots?”

“No, they come that way. Self-driving cars are inevitable, so a lot of car makers are getting a jump on it by pre-installing the hardware in newer models. Actually, the design uses some of my patents, so I guess you could say it was me.”

The significance of that was not lost on Carter. Their unknown foe could turn any autonomous car on the road against them.

The blue car was closing the distance. In terms of speed, the Tesla was more than a match for the older, classic sports car, but its real advantage was the computer brain controlling it, informed by an array of cameras, radar, and laser sensors, with reaction time measured in picoseconds and no fear whatsoever. The black car swung out from behind the Tesla and pulled up alongside it, matching its speed. Both vehicles were so close that Carter could see their distinctive hood ornaments — the stylized T with wings of Tesla motors on the blue car, and the blue and white checkered circle that identified the coupe as a Beemer.

Fallon saw them, too, and to Carter’s astonishment he gave a little laugh. “Ha. Watch this.”

He reached for the armrest again, and this time Carter could not help but glance down as he threw one of the switches.

A cloud of black smoke billowed out behind the car, blocking her view of the two pursuit vehicles. “A smoke screen?” she asked, incredulous. “Seriously?”

“Whoops,” Fallon said. “Wrong one.” He flipped a different switch.

Although the two vehicles were still partially hidden by the dense cloud, Carter could tell that something was happening. The blue car swerved into the coupe, and then both cars were spinning as if they had hit a patch of ice…

Or an oil slick.

The BMW went sideways and then flipped and started tumbling down the highway before disappearing once more in the smoke. The Tesla veered off the road and crashed into a fence.

“You made a spy car,” Carter said, with more than a little disgust. “Or are you going to tell me those are standard features, too?”

“They are for this car,” Fallon said with a grin. “This is the actual Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger. All the gadgets from the movie were actually built into the car. I got it at auction a few years ago.”

The smoke screen petered out, but there was no sign of pursuit behind them. Or any other traffic for that matter. The opposite lane was turning into a parking lot.

“Someone sold you a car with actual working spy weapons? Oil slicks and machine guns? Missiles?”

“There aren’t any missiles,” Fallon replied, sounding just a little rueful. “And the machine guns were just props. I had to switch those out, but believe me, I wouldn’t have paid what I did for this car unless the gadgets were functional. Never would have dreamed I’d actually get to use them.”

“You just dumped oil all over a Swiss highway, and all you can think is ‘dreams come true?’” Even as she said it, she remembered that she was up to her neck in this mess because of Fallon’s reckless — almost sociopathic — disregard for consequences.

“You said it yourself. My toys are trying to kill us. Well, I just used one of my toys to save us. And I am letting you drive.”

Carter had no argument for either point. “Just don’t use the oil slick again if you can help it.”

“Couldn’t even if I wanted to. It’s a one-shot deal. Smoke screen and oil slick are gone, but we still have road spikes, tire-shredder hubcaps, and of course the machine guns. Oh, and don’t worry about the ejection seat. That was never functional.”

“Pity,” she muttered, entertaining a fantasy of pushing a button and shooting Fallon through the roof. She shook her head to clear the image. “If we can’t get back into Tomorrowland, we may need to come up with some alternatives. What would it take to build a new transmitter?”

“Well, the Roswell Fragment is the critical component. Aside from that, any large radio telescope with a 10 gigahertz frequency transmitter should suffice.” Fallon looked back at Tanaka, as if for confirmation. “There’s at least a dozen of them in Europe. I think the closest one is in France.”

“Finding the right antenna isn’t the problem,” Tanaka said. “It’s time. We’re—”

“Look out!”

Carter had been watching the road the whole time but saw nothing to warrant Fallon’s cry of alarm. Unsure of where to look for the threat, she chose the only route that she knew was clear — straight ahead — and floored the gas pedal again.

The Aston Martin shot forward again. As they raced ahead, she spied movement in the mirrors — not a car, but something else. A flying something.

“It’s a Stork,” Fallon sputtered, anger in his tone for the first time since the nightmare began. He swore, punching the dashboard. “Bastards. They hacked the Storks.”

The Storks, Carter recalled, were Fallon’s robot delivery drones, the source of the fortune that had made everything else possible.

Robots, self-driving cars, and now delivery drones, she thought. This is how the robot apocalypse begins.

The drone — a hybrid construct of airfoils and helicopter rotors about the size of a bicycle turned on its side — appeared in the mirror, falling further and further behind with each passing second. Advanced technology or not, the Storks didn’t have the power to keep up with the Aston Martin.

There was a flash of movement in front of them, and before Carter could react, another Stork slammed into the windshield. The steering wheel spun through her fingers — not a robot seizing control of the car, but simply momentum and acceleration. Then the world turned upside down.